310 ENGLISH SAGA

cruelty and misery of the war—the British people assumed in
their insular, hopeful way that every one else felt the same.
Through their voluntary associations and parliamentary insti-
tutions they affirmed over and over again their sense of
its necessity and their faith in the League of Nations and the '
machinery of international law. They even succeeded with the
help of their Anglo-Saxon kinsmen in the United States in per-
suading the statesmen of the world to affix their signatures to a
document called the Kellog Pact, repudiating war as an instru-
ment of policy. For, having suffered so much from the tidal
flood of war, they supposed, like King Canute, that an edict
against tides would protect them from further inundation.
Their courtiers, the democratic newspapers and politicians,
loudly assured them that it would.

; Yet, everywhere, the old national jealousies and fears barred
the way to that rule of perpetual peace and international law
that was the Englishman's ideal. Italy wanted naval parity with
France, and the U.S.A. with Britain, who in turn depended for her
very existence on the freedom of her sea routes. Japan wanted
hegemony in Eastern waters; Soviet Russia, in order to secure
and further the proletarian revolutionary experiment, wanted
the largest air-force in the world; Poland wanted a big army,
preferably mounted, to defend herself against Russia; and Czecho-
slovakia and Belgium wanted the continued profits from the sale
of the armaments they so industriously manufactured. Every
disarmament conference failed. For no formula could resolve
these eternal discordancies.

Into, this imbroglio of rival expedients, figures and formulas, -
like a bull entering a china shop, burst Hitler. Even before the
easy-going, preoccupied British public had become conscious of
his strident rancour, their pacific hopes had been dashed. In
1931, Japan, seeking preferential markets for the expanding
industrial population of her overcrowded island, marched into
an anarchic China to seize Manchuria. British peace-lovers
protested, the more logical of them even clamouring to go to
war to vindicate the decencies of international law and the rules
of the League of Nations. But neither their fellow members of
the League, nor Japan's great rival, the United States, was pre-
pared to go to such an extreme and desperate course. Nor were
the British—Ihen in the throes of a financial crisis—in any
position, after ten years of disarmament, to impose single- -