The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany, That will only end when the results of fifty years of aggressive education in Germany have worn away.  This will be so plain that the great bulk of people everywhere will not only see their changing economic relationships far more distinctly than such things have been seen hitherto, but that they will see them as they have never been seen before, definitely orientated to the threat of German world predominance.  The landlord who squeezes, the workman who strikes and shirks, the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that most people know, that what he does is done, not under an empty, regardless heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy and in disregard of a continuous urgent necessity for unity.

So far we have followed this speculation upon fairly firm ground, but now our inquiry must plunge into a jungle of far more difficult and uncertain possibilities.  Our next stage brings us to the question of how people and peoples and classes of people are going to react to the new conditions of need and knowledge this war will have brought about, and to the new demands that will be made upon them.

This is really a question of how far they will prove able to get out of the habits and traditions of their former social state, how far they will be able to take generous views and make sacrifices and unselfish efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking or class selfishness regardless of the common welfare.  This is a question we have to ask separately of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as a whole, and of the Allies as a whole, before we can begin to estimate the posture of the peoples of the world in, say, 1946.

Now let me here make a sort of parenthesis on human nature.  It will be rather platitudinous, but it is a necessary reminder for what follows.

So far as I have been able to observe, nobody lives steadily at one moral level.  If we are wise we shall treat no man and no class—­and for the matter of that no nation—­as either steadfastly malignant or steadfastly disinterested.  There are phases in my life when I could die quite cheerfully for an idea; there are phases when I would not stir six yards to save a human life.  Most people fluctuate between such extremes.  Most people are self-seeking, but most people will desist from a self-seeking cause if they see plainly and clearly that it is not in the general interest, and much more readily if they also perceive that other people are of the same mind and know that they know their course is unsound.

The fundamental error of orthodox political economy and of Marxian socialism is to assume the inveterate selfishness of everyone.  But most people are a little more disposed to believe what it is to their interest to believe than the contrary.  Most people abandon with reluctance ways of living and doing that have served them well.  Most people can see the neglect of duty in other classes more plainly than they do in their own.