not) then it persists; if it fails, then it goes to the wall. This physical competition, often fierce and not seldom fatal, frequently goes on between persons and families and tribes, but it is not the sine qua non of progress.

Moreover, it has been explained by competent students, and among them Herbert Spencer1 and Peter Kropotkin,2 that the instinct towards mutual sympathy and aid is quite as natural and common among the lower beasts and primitive men as is antipathy and combativeness. It ought to be apparent that the real struggle of life is man's struggle with the hostile forces in his own nature and with the alien elements in the natural world, so dramatically pictured in the Forest Scene of Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue Bird. Hence it is by

1 See Herbert Spencer's Data of Ethics.

2 See Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution. 3 Novicov, the brilliant Russian sociologist, in his Critique du darwinisme Sociale, emphasised the distinctions between numerous varieties of forces. Dr. Fried, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1911, summarises, in his recent volume, The Restoration of Europe (p. 35), the substance of Novicov's idea in the following fashion:

"The stars attract matter; the stronger animal eats the weaker, and by digestion transforms it into a part of its own self. But one celestial body can not chew another, nor can a lion attract cells away from an antelope. The astronomic struggle is different from the biological, and so is the sociological. The fact that the lion tears open the antelope does not imply that the massacre of the population of one state by that of another is a natural law. But imperialisin leads us into just such a sea of error. It breeds conceit and turns a noble patriotism into Chauvinism."

co-operation, and not by competition, that man strengthens himself for his difficult test with the facts and forces in this world that make life hard.

CHAPTER XV

DRAINING THE SWAMPS

THE third article in the creed of militarism says that Privilege is an Advantage; in a word, Imperialism. Mediævalism in government is akin to imperialism in trade. Monarchy is monopoly in terms of politics, and monopoly is monarchy in terms of economics. The imperialism we are now thinking about is a new kind of imperialism, what Frederick Howe has called "financial imperialism." 1

At the close of the last century Charles Ferguson wrote: "In politics two ideas, reducible to one, have dominated the century: the building up of huge political aggregates and the winning of foreign markets. Under Cæsar and Charlemagne the imperial idea was not without nobility and beauty - it was a world-communion; it aimed to take in everything. But this nineteenth-century market rivalry of subventioned traders this ruck and drift of blind masses that huddle to the hunger-call 1 Why War? by Frederick Howe.

and the shibboleths of Chauvinism is a spectacle without nobility or beauty. One empire seemed an inspiring possibility; a multiplicity of empires French, German, Austrian, Russian, English, Italian, Turkish, American, and so on-is mere unreason and the flow of fate. It is the obscurantism of politics and the evacuation of the ideal. Patriotism has become the refuge not necessarily of scoundrels,' but of traders, professional soldiers, and politicians." 1

We have already pointed out that an examination of the wars of history and an analysis of their causes shows that they were motived by either the passion for liberty, or the hunger for food, or the love for combat, or the lust for power, or the greed for gain, or the desire for privilege. It is neither fantastic nor extravagant to suggest that the real task of modern diplomacy should be to undertake an exhaustive study of wars new and old for the purpose of discovering not only the occasions which precipitated hostilities but what the underlying causes were and are which made war "inevitable." Constructive statesmanship would then proceed to

1 Religion of Democracy, p. 164. See also article by Henri Lambert entitled "International Morality and Exchange," in the Journal des Economistes, now published in pamphlet form with a special introduction by the Rt. Hon. Lord Courtney of Penwith.

find and to administer such remedies as might be needed. Many of the causes that made for wars in past times no longer have any force, or at any rate they are less and less influential. For example, the cause of many primitive wars was undoubtedly the hunger for food. If it is urged that to-day wars are brought about by the exigent needs of nations to expand and colonise in order to provide for their increased population, the answer is that emigration is possible without colonisation. But if colonies are considered to be really necessary, then negotiation might very conceivably handle the problem by the peaceable partition of unexploited regions.

But of course everybody knows that a motive quite the opposite is now much more prevalent and dominant. Instead of underproduction of food and articles of common use, there is vast overproduction. Due to the invention of modern machinery, production has steadily gained on consumption. And consumption has not been able to keep up with production very largely because the distribution of the gains of industry have not been equitable. In other words, the workers who stood in need of things could not buy them with the wages that they were paid, and so new markets had to be