TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 517
was this also to be predicted of the United States ? The question was a
pertinent one, since there could not be a major war unless two Powers of
first-class calibre were each prepared in the last resort to go to war with
the other; and, when, at the opening of the latter half of the twentieth
century, an inquirer put to himself the question whether the United
States, as well as the Soviet Union, was willing to face a war with the one
Power of her own calibre that was still on the map, he would find himself
giving this question an affirmative answer.

Since the declaration of the independence of the United States, and
perhaps since the first settlement of the oldest of the Thirteen Colonies,
the American people had been one of the most unmilitary, yet at the
same time one of the most martial, of the nations of the Western World.
They had been unmilitary in the sense that they had disliked submitting
themselves to military discipline and had had no Gallic ambition to see
their country win military glory for such glory's own sake. They had
been martial in the sense that, till the date of the closing of the frontier
circa A.D. 1890, they had always numbered among them a contingent of
frontiersmen accustomed, not only to bearing arms, but to using these
at their own personal discretion in pursuit of their own private enter-
prises—a state of affairs which had become obsolete in Great Britain,
even on the Anglo-Scottish Border, after the Union of the Crowns in
A.D. 1603, and obsolete in most Continental West European countries
since before the close of the fifteenth century. The martial spirit of ten
generations of American frontiersmen would have been acknowledged by
the North American Indians at any time since the first landing of White
men from the British Isles on American coasts; by the English colonists'
French rivals in the eighteenth century; and by their Mexican victims
in the nineteenth century—and these encounters between the Anglo-
American frontiersmen and their competitors for the possession of North
America are also evidence that not only the frontiersmen, but the Ameri-
can people as a whole, were prepared, exceptionally and temporarily, to
submit themselves to a military discipline without which the frontiers-
men's personal spirit and prowess would have been unable to prevail
against antagonists of their own cultural level.

The soldierly qualities latent hi the American people as a whole had
been revealed to their British adversaries in the wars of A.D. 1775-83 and
1812-14, and to their German adversaries in the wars of 1916-18 and
1941-5; but, up to date, by far the most impressive demonstration of
American valour, discipline, generalship, and, not least, endurance had
been given in a war in which Americans had been arrayed against
Americans. The civil war of A.D. 1861-5 between the Union and the
Confederacy had been the lonjgest, the most stubborn, the costliest in
casualties, and the most fertile in technological innovations of all wars in
the Western World between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the out-
break of the First World War; and this was a portent that the twentieth-
century German militarists had twice overlooked to their own undoing.

Moreover, the two world wars that, within living memory, had har-
rowed Germany and Germany's Russian and West European victims,
as severely as the American Civil War had harrowed the South, had left