Page 11 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

the monarch who had first conceived the idea, was also the first
to unsheathe his sword in a conflict dictated on both sides by the
most unrighteous greed and aggression. In fact this series of wars,
whether fought in Northern or Southern Africa, in Manchuria or
the Balkans, were marked most prominently by the spirit which
disregards cynically that very idea of inherent and existing rights,
that balance of law and equity upon which alone arbitration can
be founded. As for the Concert of Europe, it seems far enough
from us now, almost antediluvian in its antiquity, — as it belongs
indeed to the age before the deluge; but we can remember well
enough what an unmusical and discordant concert it was, what a
series of fumblings and blunderings and how its diplomacy led us
fatally to the inevitable event against which it struggled. Now it
is suggested by many to substitute a United States of Europe for
the defunct Concert and for the poor helpless Hague tribunal an
effective Court of international law with force behind it to impose
its decisions. But so long as men go on believing in the sovereign
power of machinery, it is not likely that the gods either will cease
from their studied irony.
CWSA 25:608-09

Science and war
There have been other speculations and reasonings; inge-
nious minds have searched for a firmer and more rational ground
of faith. The first of these was propounded in a book by a Rus-
sian writer which had an enormous success in its day but has now
passed into the silence. Science was to bring war to an end by
making it physically impossible. It was mathematically proved that
with modern weapons two equal armies would fight each other
to a standstill, attack would become impossible except by num-
bers thrice those of the defence and war therefore would bring
no military decision but only an infructuous upheaval and distur-
bance of the organised life of the nations. When the Russo-Japa-

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