Excerpt from How Europe Armed for War: 1871 1914
This little work makes no claim to be an exhaustive analysis of the armament problem with which it deals. Nor is it written from the viewpoint of an anti-militarist agitator so much as from that of a keenly interested student of the economics of naval and military power. It endeavors to discover and to delineate the part which the engineer and the chemist have played in the perfection of war material, and the reactions which the manufacture of munitions, to meet an ever-growing demand, has had upon the metal, machinery and associated trades in industrial communities. Amid all the vast literature of naval, military, imperialist and pacifist writers one looks in vain for any thorough treatment of the war industries in relation to the development of the war system. There are a few pamphlets, but none of these are satisfactory. Very few militarists seem to have any appreciation of the dependence of the fighting services on the industrial system, whilst their opponents display an equally displeasing aversion to a closer acquaintanceship with what they regard as the unclean thing. Personally, I ungrudgingly avow a keen interest in all the wondrous machinery of war, behind, and inseparable from which, are the workshops and shipyards, ever the finest embodiments of modern production. There is romance in the war machines - the greatest triumph of human ingenuity and the crowning tragedy of its murderous application.
It is within the last half century that nations have laid up vast armaments for war in time of peace. Formerly they collected and trained men, accumulated money, but did not furnish themselves with gigantic supplies of munitions. Perhaps that is why this aspect of militarism has no literature. Never before was the soldier or the sailor a mechanic. Only to-day is he becoming a machine-minder, an operative. It is a memorable revolution, for it alters the whole nature of war.
Let us understand this new development. Before we put forward proposals for abolishing or limiting or controlling armament manufacture, let us examine the system. That is what this little book tries to do and nothing more... at present.
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