CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE WORLD TO-DAY

If the world cannot organise against war,
if war must go on, then the nations can protect
themselves henceforth only by using whatever
destructive agencies they can invent till the re-
sources and inventions of science end by
destroying humanity they were meant to serve.

—VISCOUNT GREY

This observation was made by Viscount Grey on 15 May
1916 when the World was in the grip of the Great Wan
Though more than twenty-two years have passed since then,
the situation in the World to-day has hardly changed for
the better. In the present chapter we shall make an ob-
jective survey of the facts of recent human history which
have contributed to such a state of affairs. "When war
broke out in 1914," wrote Mr. Basil Matthews in the Review
oj Reviews, May 1920, " five empires of the despotic mili-
tary type remained on the earth's surface. They were the
German, the Austrian, the Turkish, the Russian, and the
Japanese. To-day four out of the five are smashed in
irretrievable ruin, Japan alone remains. The old European
order has gone—the one Asiatic Power, rich now beyond
tihe dream of avarice^ with its man-power unimpaired and
its ambitions vaster than those of Alexander, leaps upon
the stage fully equipped. On the face of it, then, the first
and dominant facts of the world situation are in favour