85
                              
                                                                                                                                              
Germanic kings." (George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, p. 69.) At
the head of the "Roman" Empire was Byzantium.
127. George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, p. 80.
128. George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, pp. 66-67.
129. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin edition,
pp. 640-646.
130. George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, p. 83-85.
131. The Caliph Omar first entered Byzantine territory in 634.  In 636, he trounced
the Byzantine army at the Battle of Jarmuk, and went on to sweep up Syria,
besiege Jerusalem, and humble the Persians.  By 640, the Mohammedans had
taken Mesopotamia and Armenia and had begun their conquest of Egypt.  By 646,
they had taken Alexandria--and hence Egypt--for good.  (George Ostrogorsky,
History of the Byzantine State, pp. 113-115.)
132. In the Naval Treaty of 1922, the United States, Britain and Japan agreed to a
strict, ten-year limitation on new warship construction, and to the abandonment of
two million tons of planned or actual military vessels.  American Secretary of State
Charles Evans Hughes said that as a result of the Treaty, "Preparation for naval
warfare will stop now."  (Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History
of the 1920's, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York, 1964, {originally
published 1931}, pp. 109-110.)  Then, in 1925, negotiators signed the Locarno
Pact, "in which the Western powers guaranteed their mutual frontiers and promised
never to go to war over them again."  Everyone thought that Locarno was a virtual
guarantee of peace... except the Germans.  German Foreign Minister Gustav
Stresemann, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the treaty, told his
confidants that the document simply bought Germany time in which to rearm.
(William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey: A memoir of a Life and the Times; Volume
I: The Start 1904-1930,  pp. 250, 415-416.)
But this was not the first modern effort to end war by rational  means.  Almost
twenty years earlier, at the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, the Great Powers
had made an equally futile effort to eliminate war via negotiation.  The agreement
hammered out at the Hague prohibited the launch of explosives from balloons,
guaranteed the safety of neutral territory, outlawed surprise attack, and limited the
use of naval mines.  Unfortunately, these well-intentioned resolutions were unable
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