I am not going to defend England against the charge that she entered this war on a cold calculation of mercantile profit.  Every one here knows that the charge is utterly untrue.  Those who believe the charge could not be shaken in their belief except by being educated all over again, and introduced to some knowledge of human nature.  It is enough to remark that this charge is a commonplace between belligerent nations.  They all like to believe that their adversaries entertain only base motives, while they themselves act only on the loftiest ideal promptings.  If the charge means only that every nation at war is bound to think of its own interests, to conserve its own strength, and to seize on all material gains that are within its reach, the charge is true and harmless.  When two angry women quarrel in a back street, they commonly accuse each other of being amorous.  They might just as well accuse each other of being human.  The charge is true and insignificant.  So also with nations; they all cherish themselves and seek to preserve their means of livelihood.

If this were their sole concern, there would be few wars; certainly this war, which is desolating and impoverishing Europe, would be impossible.  No one, surely, can look at the war and say that nations are moved only by their material interests.  It would be more plausible to say that they are too little moved by those interests.  Bacon, in his essay Of Death, remarks that the fear of death does not much affect mankind.  ’There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him.  Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it; grief flieth to it, fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the Emperor had slain himself, pity (which is the tenderest of affections) provoked many to die out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers.’  If this is true of the fear of death, how much truer it is of the love of material gain.  Any whim, or point of pride, or fixed idea, or old habit, is enough to make a man or a nation forgo the hope of profit and fight for a creed.

The German creed is by this time well known.  Before the war we took little notice of it.  We sometimes saw it stated in print, but it seemed to us too monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole people.  We were wrong; it was the creed of a whole people.  By the mesmerism of State education, by the discipline of universal military service, by the pride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fears natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolute belief in the State, in war as the highest activity of the State, and in the right of the State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, to its purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse peoples that are united under