Latterly, gradually, but increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the industrial arts.
What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a ready answer.

It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful, undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the ancient discipline to which men have been subjected.

So much, however, would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their increasing disserviceability,--as would be done, e.g., or at least sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a state of mutual envy and distrust.
* * * * * Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise in dominion.
As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never equalled.

No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much less to make headway in warlike enterprise, without the most thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts.

Which signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of civilisation.