Even her defenders are ceasing now to urge that she can possibly derive any real benefit from this colossal ineptitude. Is it not time that the man in the street--verily, I believe, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology--insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportions, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human co-operation? But are we to assume that the extension of a European nation's authority overseas can never be worth while; or that it could, or should, never be the occasion for conflict between nations; or that the rôle of, say, England in India or Egypt, is neither useful nor profitable? In the second part of this book I have attempted to uncover the general principle--which sadly needs establishing in politics--serving to indicate clearly the advantageous and disadvantageous employment of force. Because force plays an undoubted rôle in human development and co-operation, it is sweepingly concluded that military force and the struggle between groups must always be a normal feature of human society. To a critic, who maintained that the armies of the world were necessary and justifiable on the same grounds as the police forces of the world ("Even in communities such as London, where, in our civic capacity, we have nearly realized all your ideals, we still maintain and are constantly improving our police force"), I replied: When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the running in of burglars and "drunks," is using them to lead an attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy of "municipal expansion," or "Civic Imperialism," or "Pan-Londonism," or what not; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham patriots--when that happens you can safely approximate a police force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the two--the army and the police force--have in reality diametrically opposed rôles. The police exist as an instrument of social co-operation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by "capturing" or "subjugating" another, in some unexplained way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another.