Now that the first business of the State is regarded as the development of facilities for trade, War between great nations is only a question of time.

No Hague Conferences can avert it--EDITOR.
4.

DIFFERENCE.
The essential difference consists in this, that War is no activity of the will, which exerts itself upon inanimate matter like the mechanical Arts; or upon a living but still passive and yielding subject, like the human mind and the human feelings in the ideal Arts, but against a living and reacting force.

How little the categories of Arts and Sciences are applicable to such an activity strikes us at once; and we can understand at the same time how that constant seeking and striving after laws like those which may be developed out of the dead material world could not but lead to constant errors.

And yet it is just the mechanical Arts that some people would imitate in the Art of War.