It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to national gain or a recourse in case of need.

And there is commonly no settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to arms.
Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being.

As has just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain.

And these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent neighbors.

Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions.