Once the ball has been set rolling in the required direction, influences of all kinds are brought to bear for the purpose of permanently fixing this idea in the public mind. A flood of innuendo, denunciation, and distorted information is let loose. Every dishonorable motive and the most sinister of projects are attributed to the Government and the people selected for attack. The public becomes the sport of private ambitions and interests, of personal prejudices and obscure passions, which it can neither detect nor control, and, for the most part, does not even suspect. The power for mischief wielded by these forces is to-day immense, owing to a cheap press and to the concentration of a large number of newspapers, possessing in the aggregate an enormous circulation, under one directing will. At the present moment the editorial and news columns of some fifty British newspapers echo the views of one man, who is thus able to superimpose in permanent fashion upon public thought the dead weight of his own prejudices or personal aims and intentions, and to exercise a potent influence upon the Government of the day. [Sidenote: How the “Balance of Power” works.] For the last few years these newspapers have striven with unceasing pertinacity to create an atmosphere of ill-will and suspicion between Great Britain and Germany. The effort has been continuous, systematic, and magnificently organized, and inferential evidence is not lacking that it has been pursued with the approval and even with the assistance of certain official influences, and to the satisfaction of certain foreign Governments. This propaganda has had, needless to say, its counterpart in Germany. _The net result of the latest recrudescence of the “Balance of Power” policy with its Alliances and Ententes as the dominating factor in international relationships is now visible to all men. A quarrel (whose culminating episode was the murder in a Bosnian town of the heir to the Austrian throne last June) between Austria and Serbia, to which the Russian Government determined to become a party, has already involved the peoples of France, Belgium, Britain, and Germany, the first three of whom were not even remotely concerned, in a terrible and desolating war._ Japan and Montenegro have also become involved, and the same fate may overtake Holland, Italy, the other Balkan States, and the Scandinavian Powers. But for the policy of the “Balance of Power” the results of the quarrel would almost certainly have been confined to the parties immediately affected, and an early mediation by the neutral Powers would have been possible. Bright’s scathing denunciation of the fetish of the “Balance of Power” appeals with even greater force to us to-day: