A Study of War

$15.00

THE present time, when far and away the greatest part of the globe is engulfed in a conflict that is being fought with the most perfected scientific weapons of destruction, is grimly appropriate for an all-out study of the phenomenon called war. And Professor Wright’s work is breath-taking in its massive comprehensiveness. It is embodied in two volumes, of a total length of more than fifteen hundred pages, and it represents the fruit of many years of research.

The result is almost an encyclopedia on the subject of war, with detailed information on subjects as far removed as the fighting habits of primitive tribes and some of the streamlined tendencies in modern politics and economics and science which make war in our time more universal in scope and more destructive for civilians as well as soldiers.

To some extent the diffuse character of the study may well militate against a wide popular audience, especially as some parts of it are written in that formidable “academic” style which is the peculiar property of college professors and social workers. At the same time a courageous and resolute reader can extract from these massive volumes a large variety of useful and varied bits of information, ranging from the eloquent condemnation of war by the great humanist Erasmus to the number of wars and the frequency of participation by individual states from 1481 until 1941.

Most interesting, perhaps, from the standpoint of the general reader, are Professor Wright’s own ideas about the cure of war. He is a universalist in his approach, not a regionalist. He is also a staunch upholder of collective security, without which, as he believes, there cannot be voluntary adjustments and concessions as between states. w. H. C.