Washington, December 5.

An examination of the situation that has arisen in Europe between France, England and Germany brings us out to exactly the same conclusion as an examination of the Pacific situation. There is no other alternative than this: Either to fight it out and establish the definite ascendancy of some one power or to form an alliance based on an explicit settlement, an alliance, indeed, sustaining a common executive commission to watch and maintain the observance of that settlement. There is no way out of war but an organized peace. Washington illuminates that point. We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for—a continuation of war. So it is worth considering what that continuation of war will be like. If you will not organize peace through some such association, then organize for war, for certainly war will come again to you, or to your children.

And for reasons set out in my earlier papers, reasons amply confirmed by the experiences of the Washington gathering, a mere limitation of armaments can be little more than a strategic truce. It may indeed even cut out expensive items and so cheapen and facilitate war.

Let me note here in passing that the case for some Association of Nations to discuss and control the common interests of mankind rests on a wider basis than the mere prevention of war; the economic and social divisions and discords of mankind provide, perhaps, in the long run, a stronger and more conclusive argument for human unity than the mere war evil, but in this paper I will narrow the issue down to war, simply, and ask the reader to consider the probable nature of war in the future if the development of warfare is not checked by deliberate human effort.

And I will not deal with the ill-equipped cut-throat war that has been going on, and, thanks to the divisions and rivalries of France and Britain, is likely still to go on in Eastern Europe for some time to come; the wars of the little, self-determined nations that the Treaty of Versailles set loose upon each other; the raids of Poland into Ukrainia, and of Roumania into Hungary; and of Serbia into Albania; the old-fashioned game enlivened by rape and robbery that was brought to its highest perfection long ago in the Thirty Years’ War. These are not so much wars as spasms of energy, phases of accelerated destruction, in the rotting body of East European civilization.

But I mean the sort of war that will come if presently France attacks England, or if America and Japan start in for a good, long, mutually destructive struggle. You may say that war between France and England is unthinkable, but so far from that being the case, certain worthy souls in France have been thinking about it hard. Hard but not intelligently. They do not understand the moral impossibility of Britain fighting America, they have never heard of Canada, they have never examined the text of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and so they dream of a wonderful time when America will be fighting England and Japan, and when France, with magnificent gestures and with submarines and Senegalese at last gloriously justified, will “come to her aid.” So France will divide and rule and clamber to dizzy destinies. Blushing and embarrassed American statesmen have already had to listen, I guess, to some insidious whispers. Even among our distresses there is something amusing in the thought of this hot breath of Old World diplomacy on the fresh American cheek. I do not say that these are the thoughts and acts of France, or of any great section of the French people, but they are certainly the thoughts and proceedings of a noisy Nationalist minority in France which is at present in a position of dangerous ascendancy there.

Still, apart from the fact that the British will always refuse to fight America, there does seem to be no real reason why, in the absence of a developing peace alliance to prevent it, either of the other two matches I have cited should not be played. In the long run, you cannot avoid fighting if you avoid comprehensive alliances and standing arrangements for the settlement of differences with the people you may otherwise fight.

So let us try and imagine a war between a pair of these four powers, five or ten years ahead. They have avoided any entangling alliances, or agreements, or settlements, kept their freedom of action and are thoroughly—prepared.

Let us not fall into the trap of supposing that these wars will follow the lines of the Great War of 1914–18 and that we shall have a rapid line-up of great entrenched armies, with massed parks of artillery behind them, tank attacks and all the rest of it. That sort of war is already out of fashion, and the fact that these wars that we are considering will be overseas wars puts any possibility of such a dead lock of land armies out of the case. The combatants will have to set about getting at each other in quite other fashions.

Let us recall the maxim that the object of all fighting is to produce a state of mind in the adversary, a state of mind conducive to a discontinuance of the struggle and to submission and acquiescence to the will of the victor. Old-time wars aimed simply at the small antagonist army and at the antagonist Government, but in these democratic days the will for peace or war has descended among the people and diffused itself among them, and it is the state of mind of the whole enemy population that has become the objective in war. The old idea of an invading army marching on a capital, gives place, therefore, to a new conception of an attack through propaganda, through operations designed to produce acute economic distress, and through the air, upon the enemy population.

I will take the latter branch first. Few people have any clear ideas at present of the possibilities of air warfare. The closing years of the Great War gave the world only a very slight experience of what aerial offensives can be. Always, air operations were subsidiary to the vast surface engagements of the European belligerents; they were scouting, irritating, raiding operations; there were neither the funds nor the energy available to work them out thoroughly. In these possible overseas wars we are considering, the land armies and the big guns will not be the main factors and the air and sea forces will. The powers we have considered will therefore push their air equipment on a quite different scale; they will be bound to deliver their chief blows with it; we may certainly reckon on the biggest long-range airplanes possible, on the largest bombs and the deadliest contents for them. We may certainly reckon that, within three or four hours of a declaration of war between France and England, huge bombs of high explosive, or poison gas, or incendiary stuff, will have got through the always ineffectual barrage and be livening up the streets of Paris and London. Because it is the peculiarity of air warfare that there are no fronts and no effectual parries. You bomb the other fellow almost anywhere, and similarly he bombs you.

Many people seem to think that America and Japan are too far from each other for this sort of thing, but I believe there is nothing insurmountable in these distances for an air offensive. It will be a question of days instead of hours, that is all, before the babies of Tokio or San Francisco get their whiffs of the last thing in gas. The job will be a little more elaborate; it will involve getting the air material to a convenient distance from the desired objective by means of a submersible cruiser; that is all the difference.

All the fleets in the world could hot prevent a properly prepared Japan from pouncing upon some unprotected point of the California or Mexican coast, setting up a temporary air base there, and getting to work over a radius of a thousand miles. She might even keep an air base at sea. And it would be equally easy for America to do likewise to Japan. The citizen of Los Angeles, as he blew to pieces, or coughed up his lungs and choked to death, or was crushed under the falling, burning buildings, could at least console himself by the thought that America was so thoroughly prepared that his fellow man in Tokio was certainly getting it worse, and that he blew to pieces on the soundest American lines unentangled by any alliances with decadent Old World powers. And an air war between America and Japan need not be confined to the Pacific Slope. I do not see anything to prevent Japan, if she wanted to do so, with the aid of a venial neutral or so, getting around into the Atlantic to New York and testing the stability of the great buildings downtown with a few five-ton bombs. The submarine would certainly be able to prevent any armies landing on either side of the Pacific to stop the preparation and launching of such expeditions.

I do not know how American populations would stand repeated bombing. In the late war there was not a single intrusion of air warfare into American home life. The hum of the Gotha and the long crescendo of the barrage as the thing gets near were not in the list of familiar American war sounds. Some of the European populations subjected to that kind of thing got very badly “rattled.” And yet, as I have noted, the whole force of the combatants was not in the air operations in Europe. One result in nearly every country was an outbreak of spy mania; everybody with a foreign name or a foreign look in England, for example, was suspected of “signalling.” There was much mental trouble; London possesses now a considerable number of air raid lunatics and air raid defective children, and these are only the extreme instances of a widespread overstrain. As the war went on, air stress interwoven with the acute stresses produced in public life by the development of propaganda. Public life in France, Germany and England got more and more crazy about propaganda; there was a fear of insidious whispering mischief afoot, more like the fear of witchcraft than anything else; until at last it became dangerous and ineffective to make any utterance at all except the most ferocious threats and accusations against the enemy. And a kind of paralysis of suspicion even affected the adoption of inventions. All this mental and moral confusion and deterioration is bound to happen in any highly organized community that goes into a well prepared war again. The only difference will be that it will all be larger, and intenser, and bitterer, and worse. And I will not even attempt to elaborate the consequences of the economic attack by submarines, upon shipping, and by raids of airplane fleets, assisted possibly by spies and traitors, upon the bridges, factories, depots, grain stores, ports and so forth, of the combatant countries.

If such things are not practicable across the Pacific now they will be practicable in ten years’ time.

But my subject at Washington is peace, and not war. I think it was Nevinson’s recent account of the new things in poison gas that set my imagination wandering into these possibilities of the Great Alternative to entangling treaties and difficult settlements. I will return to certain neglected problems of the Peace Conference in my next article.