IT has always been assumed that hostility between the Great Powers was inevitable. Fundamental hostility was the basis of any nation's successful foreign policy. It has always been assumed that the Foreign Office or Department of State of any Great Power would be betraying its own people it did not keep that idea in mind. This assumption was accurately put by Lord Curzon in 1900 in a letter to Lord Selborne. He says: would count everywhere on the individual hostility of the Great Powers, but would endeavour so to arrange that they were not united against me. That has been the common assumption throughout history of Great Powers and, for some strange reason, the general public has not seemed to realize that the people who have had the responsibility of directing the foreign policies of their countries have always thought of foreign policy in those terms. The assumption of inevitable hostility, and the underlying assumption that peace is abnormal, have been the foundation of the foreign policy of every country in the past. Because the general public likes peace and wants peace so ardently it finds it very difficult to believe that peace is abnormal. Nevertheless, it is abnormal as a purely statistical fact. It is an unusual moment in the history of our sad race when there is anything existing which can be called peace. Out of the two or three thousand years of our recorded history there have been two periods-neither of them quite a hundred years in length and neither of them by any means periods of total peace-two periods of relative peace in two or three thousand years of hostilities. One period came to an end with the death of MIarcus Aurelius in 180 A.D. and the other finished at the beginning of the German War of 1914. That is the best one can say for the human race in the past. It is no longer possible to assume that Great Powers must be inevitable enemies and treated as such, and that the best you can do is to see that they do not combine against you, because we have learned enough now to destroy the human race we do proceed on this assumption. We have reached a point of greater danger and precariousness than our ancestors ever knew. Therefore the demand on us, we are to survive at all, is a greater demand, and a demand for a greater exercise of imagination than our ancestors knew. When I say if we are to survive at all I am not using exaggerated or excited language. In the papers during the last few days details have been disclosed of some of the fears under which we have laboured for the past