(7) _The Dominance of Social Reform._ The final factor in the situation is the growing dominance of the process of social reform. On the one hand, the increasing complexity of social organisation renders necessary a correspondingly increasing expenditure of money in diminishing its friction and aiding its elaboration; on the other hand, the still more rapidly increasing demands of armament render it ever more difficult to devote money to such social purposes. Everywhere even the most elementary provision for the finer breeding and higher well-being of a country's citizens is postponed to the clamour for ever new armaments. The situation thus created is rapidly becoming intolerable. It is not alone the future of civilization which is for ever menaced by the possibility of war; the past of civilization, with all the precious embodiments of its traditions, is even more fatally imperilled. As the world grows older and the ages recede, the richer, the more precious, the more fragile, become the ancient heirlooms of humanity. They constitute the final symbols of human glory; they cannot be too carefully guarded, too highly valued. But all the other dangers that threaten their integrity and safety, if put together, do not equal war. No land that has ever been a cradle of civilization but bears witness to this sad truth. All the sacred citadels, the glories of humanity,--Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople,--have been ravaged by war, and, in every case, their ruin has been a disaster that can never be repaired. If we turn to the minor glories of more modern ages, the special treasure of England has been its parish churches, a treasure of unique charm in the world and the embodiment of the people's spirit: to-day in their battered and irreparable condition they are the monuments of a Civil War waged all over the country with ruthless religious ferocity. Spain, again, was a land which had stored up, during long centuries, nearly the whole of its accumulated possessions in every art, sacred and secular, of fabulous value, within the walls of its great fortress-like cathedrals; Napoleon's soldiers over-ran the land, and brought with them rapine and destruction; so that in many a shrine, as at Montserrat, we still can see how in a few days they turned a Paradise into a desert. It is not only the West that has suffered. In China the rarest and loveliest wares and fabrics that the hand of man has wrought were stored in the Imperial Palace of Pekin; the savage military hordes of the West broke in less than a century ago and recklessly trampled down and fired all that they could not loot. In every such case the loss is final; the exquisite incarnation of some stage in the soul of man that is for ever gone is permanently diminished, deformed, or annihilated.