No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind
stating my own reason for writing this one (which has taken
time that I should have liked to spend on other and very
different things). Knowledge of this reason will permit the
reader to make allowances for such bias I have been
unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my
book perhaps nearly as objective as I should myself wish it
to be.


It has been said that when two armies face each other across
a battle front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be
considered as a single army engaged in suicide. Now it
seems to me that when countries, each one severally doing
its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their utmost to
accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are
witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization
itself. There are people in both camps who believe that
armed and economic conflict between revolutionary and
non-revolutionary Europe, or if you like between Capitalism
and Communism, is inevitable. These people, in both camps,
are doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy pessimists,
in Moscow no less than in London and Paris, they go so far
as to say "the sooner the better," and by all means in their
power try to precipitate a conflict. Now the main effort in
Russia to-day, the struggle which absorbs the chief attention
of all but the few Communist Churchills and Communist
Millerands who, blind to all else, demand an immediate
pitched battle over the prostrate body of civilization, is