The main errors of the Treaty (which, remember, was the work of the greatest diplomatic experts in Europe) reveal something similar. If the punitive element--which is still applauded--defeats finally the aims alike of justice, our own security, appeasement, disarmament, and sets up moral forces that will render our New World even more ferociously cruel and hopeless than the Old, it will not be because we were ignorant of the fact that 'Germany'--or 'Austria' or 'Russia'--is not a person that can be held responsible and punished in this simple fashion. It did not require an expert knowledge of economics to realise that a ruined Germany could not pay vast indemnities. Yet sometimes very learned men were possessed by these fallacies. It is not learning that is needed to penetrate them. A wisdom founded simply on the sincere facing of self-evident facts would have saved European opinion from its most mischievous excesses. This ignorance of the learned may perhaps be related to another phenomenon; a great increase in our understanding of inert matter, unaccompanied by any corresponding increase in our understanding of human conduct. This latter understanding demands a temperamental self-control and detachment, which mere technical knowledge does not ask. Although in technical science we have made such advances as would cause the Athenians, say, to look on us as gods, we show no corresponding advance upon them, or upon the Hebrew prophets for that matter, in the understanding of conduct and its motives. And the spectacle of Germany--of the modern world, indeed--so efficient in the management of matter, so clumsy in the understanding of the essentials of human relationship, reminds us once more of the futility of mere technical knowledge, unless accompanied by a better moral understanding. For without the latter we are unable to use the improvement in technique (as Europe is unable to use it to-day) for indispensable human ends. Or worse still, technical knowledge, in the absence of wisdom and discipline, merely gives us more efficient weapons of collective suicide. Butler's fantasy of the machines which men have made acquiring a mind of their own, and then rounding upon their masters and destroying them, has very nearly come true. If some new force, like the release of atomic energy, had been discovered during this war, and applied (as Mr Wells has imagined it being applied) to bombs that would go on exploding without cessation for a week or two, we know that passions ran so high that both sides would have used them, as both sides in the next war will use super-poison gas and disease germs. Not only the destruction, therefore, but the passion and the ruthlessness, the fears and hates, the universal pre-emption of wealth for 'defence' perpetually translating itself into preventive offence, would have grown. Man's society would assuredly have been destroyed by the instruments that he himself had made, and Butler's fantasy would have come true.