The paraphernalia of war in the modern world cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment to meet each gust of ill-feeling, and be dropped when it is over. The building of battleships, the discussion of budgets and the voting of them, the training of armies, the preparation of a campaign, are a long business, and more and more in our day does each distinctive campaign involve a special and distinctive preparation. The pundits declare that the German battleships have been especially built with a view to work in the North Sea. In any case, we know that the conflict with Germany has been going on for ten years. This is surely a rather prolonged "hot fit." The truth is that war in the modern world is the outcome of armed peace, and involves, with all its elaborate machinery of yearly budgets, and slowly built warships and forts, and slowly trained armies, fixity of policy and purpose extending over years, and sometimes generations. Men do not make these sacrifices month after month, year after year, pay taxes, and upset Governments and fight in Parliament for a mere passing whim; and as conflicts necessarily become more scientific, we shall in the nature of things be forced to prepare everything more thoroughly, and have clearer and sounder ideas as to their essence, their cause, and their effects, and to watch more closely their relation to national motive and policy. The final justification for all these immense, humdrum, workaday sacrifices must be more and more national well-being. This does not imply, as some critics allege, the conclusion that an Englishman is to say: "Since I might be just as well off under the Germans, let them come"; but that the German will say: "Since I shall be no better off for the going, I will not go." Indeed, the case of the authorities cited in the preceding chapter is marked by a false form of statement. Those who plead for war on moral grounds say: "War will go on because men will defend their ideals, moral, political, social, and religious." It should be stated thus: "War will go on because men will always attack the spiritual possessions of other men," because, of course, the necessity for defence arises from the fact that these possessions are in danger of attack. Put in the second form, however, the case breaks down almost of itself. The least informed of us realizes that the whole trend of history is against the tendency for men to attack the ideals and the beliefs of other men. In the religious domain that tendency is plain, so much so that the imposition of religious ideals or beliefs by force has practically been abandoned in Europe, and the causes which have wrought this change of attitude in the European mind are just as operative in the field of politics.