The question can best be answered by briefly reviewing the claims already advanced on behalf of the national principle.  I have asserted from the start that the national principle was wholly different in origin and somewhat different in meaning from the principle of democracy.  What has been claimed for nationality is, not that it can be identified with democracy, but that as a political principle it remained unsatisfied without an infusion of democracy.  But the extent to which this infusion can go and the forms which it takes are determined by a logic and a necessity very different from that of an absolute democratic theory.  National politics have from the start aimed primarily at efficiency—­that is, at the successful use of the force resident in the state to accomplish the purposes desired by the Sovereign authority.  Among the group of states inhabited by Christian peoples it has gradually been discovered that the efficient use of force is contingent in a number of respects upon its responsible use; and that its responsible use means a limited policy of external aggrandizement and a partial distribution of political power and responsibilities.  A national polity, however, always remains an organization based upon force.  In internal affairs it depends at bottom for its success not merely upon public opinion, but, if necessary, upon the strong arm.  It is a matter of government and coercion as well as a matter of influence and persuasion.  So in its external relations its standing and success have depended, and still depend, upon the efficient use of force, just in so far as force is demanded by its own situation and the attitudes of its neighbors and rivals.  The democrats who disparage efficient national organization are at bottom merely seeking to exorcise the power of physical force in human affairs by the use of pious incantations and heavenly words.  That they will never do.  The Christian warrior must accompany the evangelist; and Christians are not by any means angels.  It is none the less true that the modern nations control the expenditure of more force in a more responsible manner than have any preceding political organizations; and it is none the less true that a further development of the national principle will mean in the end the attachment of still stricter responsibilities to the use of force both in the internal and external policies of modern nations.

War may be and has been a useful and justifiable engine of national policy.  It is justifiable, moreover, not merely in such a case as our Civil War, in which a people fought for their own national integrity.  It was, I believe, justifiable, in the case of the two wars which preceded the formation of the modern German Empire.  These wars may, indeed, be considered as decisive instances.  Prussia did not drift into them, as we drifted into the Civil War.  They were deliberately provoked by Bismarck at a favorable moment, because they were necessary to the unification of