This is so true, that every war since the days of Clausewitz has made its truth more apparent. Since he wrote, the participation of the people in war has become, not a revolutionary fact, but an organized fact, an ordinary fact in the everyday life of nations. To-day every State except Great Britain, securely based on the system of the universal training of its sons to arms, stands ready to defend its interests with the whole concentrated power, physical, intellectual, and material, of its whole manhood. Consequently, European war, as Clausewitz foresaw, "will only take place on account of great interests closely affecting the people." The character of such war will be absolute, the object of its action will be the downfall of the foe, and not till the foe (be it Great Britain or not) lies powerless on the ground will it be supposed possible to stop. In the prosecution of such a national war the means available, the energy and the effort called forth, will be without limits. Such must be the conflicts of nations-in-arms. Yet, even now, so many years after Clausewitz wrote, in the hope, as he himself stated, "to iron out many creases in the heads of strategists and statesmen," the great transformation in the character of modern war, due to the participation of the people therein, has not yet been adequately realized by many men in this country _who ought to know_. It is earnestly to be hoped that they will endeavour to adjust their minds, as regards war, to the fact that we are living, not in the eighteenth century, but in the twentieth, and that they will consider that war has once for all become an affair of the people, that our opponents will be a people-in-arms, using the uttermost means of their whole manhood to crush us, and that disaster can only be prevented by a like utmost effort on our part, by an effort regardless of everything except self-preservation. CHAPTER VI PUBLIC OPINION IN WAR "War belongs, not to the province of arts and sciences, but to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that respect is it different from others. It would be better, instead of comparing it with any art, to liken it to trade, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like state policy, which again, on its part, may be looked upon as a kind of trade on a great scale. Besides, state policy is the womb in which war is developed, in which its outlines lie hidden in a rudimentary state, like the qualities of living creatures in their germs."[13]