the causes of the war.  And this contention for control is prompted at once by the desire for power and the desire for wealth.  In practice the two motives are found conjoined.  But to different minds they appeal in different proportions.  There is such a thing as the love of power for its own sake.  It is known in individuals, and it is known in States, and it is the most disastrous, if not the most evil, of the human passions.  The modern German philosophy of the State turns almost exclusively upon this idea; and here, as elsewhere, by giving to a passion an intellectual form, the Germans have magnified its force and enhanced its monstrosity.  But the passion itself is not peculiar to Germans, nor is it only they to whom it is and has been a motive of State.  Power has been the fetish of kings and emperors from the beginning of political history, and it remains to be seen whether it will not continue to inspire democracies.  The passion for empire ruined the Athenian democracy, no less than the Spartan or the Venetian oligarchy, or the Spain of Philip II, or the France of the Monarchy and the Empire.  But it still makes its appeal to the romantic imagination.  Its intoxication has lain behind this war, and it will prompt many others if it survives, when the war is over, either in the defeated or the conquering nations.  It is not only the jingoism of Germany that Europe has to fear.  It is the jingoism that success may make supreme in any country that may be victorious.

But while power may be sought for its own sake, it is commonly sought by modern States as a means to wealth.  It is the pursuit of markets and concessions and outlets for capital that lies behind the colonial policy that leads to wars.  States compete for the right to exploit the weak, and in this competition Governments are prompted or controlled by financial interests.  The British went to Egypt for the sake of the bondholders, the French to Morocco for the sake of its minerals and wealth.  In the Near East and the Far it is commerce, concessions, loans that have led to the rivalry of the Powers, to war after war, to “punitive expeditions” and—­irony of ironies!—­to “indemnities” exacted as a new and special form of robbery from peoples who rose in the endeavour to defend themselves against robbery.  The Powers combine for a moment to suppress the common victim, the next they are at one another’s throats over the spoil.  That really is the simple fact about the quarrels of States over colonial and commercial policy.  So long as the exploitation of undeveloped countries is directed by companies having no object in view except dividends, so long as financiers prompt the policy of Governments, so long as military expeditions, leading up to annexations, are undertaken behind the back of the public for reasons that cannot be avowed, so long will the nations end with war, where they have begun by theft, and so long will thousands and millions of innocent and generous lives, the best of Europe, be thrown away to no purpose, because, in the dark, sinister interests have been risking the peace of the world for the sake of money in their pockets.