It was no wonder that during a series of lectures on The Great Illusion delivered at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, Lord Esher would declare that “new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of war,” and that the “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” of a European war would be so great as to make it unthinkable. Lord Esher and Angell were right about the meager benefits and the high costs of war. But trusting too much in the rationality of nations and seduced by the extraordinary economic achievements of the era—a period the French would later so evocatively call La
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