Note 116 — Chapter III · THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT
Reading edition
‘When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the running in of burglars and “drunks,” is using them to lead an attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy of “municipal expansion,” or “Civic Imperialism,” or “Pan-Londonism,” or what not; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham patriots—when that happens you can safely approximate a police force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the two—the army and the police force—have in reality diametrically opposed roles. The police exist as an instrument of social co-operation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by “capturing” or “subjugating” another, in some wonderful (and unexplained) way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another....
‘France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that of India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly speaking, for conquest, but for police purposes, for the establishment and maintenance of order; and, so far as they filled that role, their role was a useful one....
‘Germany has no need to maintain order in England, nor England in Germany, and the latent struggle, therefore, between these two countries is futile....
‘It is one of the humours of the whole Anglo-German conflict that so much has the British public been concerned with the myths and bogeys of the matter, that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. While even the wildest Pan-German does not cast his eyes in the direction of Canada, he does cast them in the direction of Asia Minor; and the political activities of Germany may centre on that area for precisely the reasons which result from the distinction between policing and conquest which I have drawn. German industry is coming to have a dominating situation in the Near East, and as those interests—her markets and investments—increase, the necessity for better order in, and the better organisation of, such territories, increases in corresponding degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.’ (The Great Illusion, pp. 131-2-3.)