mainspring of social action is not an emperor's dream or soldier's ambition, but the demand of vast populations for food, clothing and shelter, then for better food, clothing and shelter, and finally for the rights, privileges and institutions which will make such economic progress assured. Ancient war, which seemed so empty and causeless, is now revealed as a half-conscious effort of human societies to adjust themselves to changing economic conditions. It is a struggle for bread. Indeed, so complete has been this change in our theories that we often exaggerate this economic influence, and speak as though no emotion save hunger impelled humanity. But such exclusion of other motives is not necessary to an economic interpretation. We can emphasise the influence of economic desires, which modern Americans and Germans share with ancient Greeks and Babylonians, while still admitting the influence of other factors. Race, creed, language, geographical position, increase national friendship or animosity. While these factors influence wars, however, they are less universal, if not less potent than is the economic motive.

The significance of this economic motive to war can hardly be overstated. If wars are in the main due to fundamental, economic conflicts, then we cannot end or limit war unless we discover some alternate way to compose such economic differences. We cannot hope that the human race will stop wanting things. Men have never lived like the lilies of the field, nor wished to live so. According to our every-day morality, wanting and getting are ethical and wise, and not-wanting is unethical and decivilising. Our whole intricate, complex civilisation depends upon the physical well-being and the economic ambition of our populations, and morally, as well as physically, a beggared nation tends to decline. We may trace this degeneration of impoverished groups in some of our mountainous districts, where communities, shut off from the main productive energies of the nation, brutalise and decay. All the conditions of our life impel nations, like individuals, to advance economically, to fructify labour, to gain. If, however, the nation in its struggle for new wealth clashes with other nations, intent also upon gain, if these mobilised, economic ambitions necessarily lead to destructive wars, then we must cease declaiming against war's immorality, and seek instead to discover whether economic readjustments cannot circumscribe or even prevent wars.

To a modern business man or to a city workman this theory of the economic cause of wars is not unsatisfactory. He may quite properly introduce more idealistic elements, a desire for independence, a love of conquest, the influence of personal prejudices, dynastic affiliations, racial antagonism and religious hatreds, but in the end he will apply to this business of war the same canons of judgment that he applies to his own business. "Whom does it pay? What is 'in it' for the nations or for classes or individuals within the nations?" And if you tell him that in the present war Servian hatred was intensified because Austria discriminated against Servian pigs, or that Germany was embittered because of Russian tariffs and French colonial policies, if you speak to him in these economic terms, you are immediately intelligible. Economic motive is one of the obvious facts of life.

It is the transcendentalists who interpret war in more idealistic terms. In every country, but especially in Germany, there is a whole school of historical and pseudo-historical romanticists, who defend war by elevating it high above the reach of reason. You cannot shake the convictions of such writers by an account of war atrocities, of slaughter, pillage, rape, mutilations and the spitting of infants upon lances, just as you cannot deter murderers by the sight of public executions. All these horrors are but a part of war's terrible fascination. "In war," writes the late Professor J. A. Cramb, one of the most eloquent of these war mystics, "man values the power which it affords to life of rising above life, the power which the spirit of man possesses to pursue the ideal." There is, and can be, in his view, no reason for war; war transcends reason. In spite of its unreason, war, which has always governed the world, always ruled the lives of men, always uplifted the strong and deposed the weak, will remain beautifully terrible, immortally young. As in ancient days, in India, Babylon, Persia, China, Hellas and Rome, so to-day, men will choose "to die greatly and with a glory that will surpass the glories of the past." Men are always greater than the earthly considerations that seem to guide their lives. As patriotism ruled the hosts of Rome and Carthage, as the ideal of empire drove forth the valorous Englishmen who conquered India, so to-day, to-morrow and until the end of time high and noble ideas, far above the comprehension of mere rationalists, will impel men to war, "to die greatly."

It may seem importunate to reason with men upon a subject which they include among the mysteries, beyond reason. Yet if we analyse the instances, which Professor Cramb and others cite of wars waged for great ideal purposes, we stumble incontinently upon stark economic motives. Carthage and Rome did not fight for glory but for food. The prize was the fertile wheat fields of Sicily. There was nothing transcendental in the wars between Athens and Sparta, but a naked conflict for commerce and exploitative dominion. As for the British conquest of India, the "ideal of empire" was perfectly translatable into a very acute desire for trade.

We shall make little progress unless we understand this business or economic side of war, for to see war truly we must see it naked. All its romanticism is but the gold lace upon the dress uniform. The idealism of the individual is a mere derivative of those crude appetites of the mass that drive nations into the conflict. Wherever we open the book of history, and read of marching and counter-marching, of slaughter and rapine, we discover that the tribes, clans, cities or nations engaged in these bloody conflicts were not fighting for nothing, whatever they themselves may have believed, but were impelled in the main by the hope of securing economic goods—food, lands, slaves, trade, money.

It is a wide digression from the immediate problems of our closely knit world of to-day to the blind, animal instincts that ruled the destinies of endless successions of hunting tribes, exterminating each other in the savage forest. Yet among hunting tribes, at all times, the raw conflict of economic motive, which we find more decently garbed in modern days, appears crude and stark. To kill or starve is the eternal choice. Since population increases faster than food, war becomes inevitable, for the tribe that hunts on our land, and eats our food, is our hereditary enemy. To pastoral nations, war is equally necessary, unless babies and old people are to be ruthlessly sacrificed. To fill new mouths larger flocks are necessary, to feed larger flocks new pastures are required; and there is only one way to obtain fresh pastures. There comes a period of drought, and the hunger-maddened nation, accompanied by its flocks, hurls itself suddenly upon feebler agricultural peoples, destroying empires and founding them. These are the great Völkerwanderungen, the restless migrations of mobile pastoral nations in search of food. It is the eternal bloody quest.

Nor are agricultural populations immune. Not only must they defend their patches of cultivated land, but, as numbers increase, must strike out for new lands. When the growing population makes conditions intolerable, youths are chosen, perhaps by religious rites, to adventure, sword in hand, and carve out new territory or die fighting. There are always more than there is place for, and it is always possible for