alliances, whatever form they may assume, whether of one capitalist coalition against another or of a general union embracing all the capitalist powers—are inevitably nothing but truces in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars and in their turn grow out of wars, the one conditioning the other, generating the alternating forms of peaceful and warlike struggle out of the one same basis of imperialist connections and the relations between world economics and world politics.
An American writer, D. J. Hill,98 in his History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, points out in his preface the following periods of contemporary diplomatic history.
(1) The revolutionary period.
(2) The constitutional movement.
(3) The present period of "commercial imperialism."
Another writer divides the history of Britain's external policy, since 1870, into four periods.
(1) The Asiatic period: that of the struggle against Russian progress, in Central Asia, towards India.
(2) The African period (approximately 1885-1902): of struggles against France for the partition of Africa (the Fashoda incident of 1898, which brought France within a hair's-breadth of war with Britain).
(3) The second Asiatic period: (Alliance with Japan against Russia), and
(4) The European period, chiefly anti-German.
"The political skirmishes of the advance troops takes place on the financial field," wrote Riesser, the banker, in 1905, showing how French finance-
