The dominant classes in Germany also found that their power was being undermined by the growing industrialisation.  The steady increase in the social-democratic vote was a portent not to be disregarded.  A letter from a German officer to a friend in Roumania, which found its way into the newspapers, tells a great deal of truth in a few words.  ’You cannot conceive,’ he wrote, ’what difficulty we had in persuading our Emperor that it was necessary to let loose this war.  But it has been done; and I hope that for a long time to come we shall hear no more in Germany of pacifism, internationalism, democracy, and similar pestilent doctrines.’  Sir Charles Walston, in his thoughtful book ‘Aristodemocracy,’ lays great stress on this.  ‘It appeared to me,’ he says, ’ever since 1905, that in the immediate future it was all a question as to whether the labour-men, the practical pacifists, would arrive at the realisation of their power before the militarists had forced a war upon us, or whether the military powers would anticipate this result, and within the next few years force a war upon the world.’  To the influence of the military was added the cupidity of the commercial and financial class.  The law of diminishing returns was driving capital further and further afield; and large profits, it was hoped, might be made by the exploitation of backward countries and the reduction of their inhabitants to serfdom.  To a predatory and parasitic class war seems only a logical extension of the principles upon which it habitually acts; and for this reason privileged orders seldom feel much moral compunction about a war-policy.  Lastly, among the causes of the war must be reckoned one which has received far too little attention from social and political philosophers—­the tenacious and half-unconscious memories of a race.  Injustice comes home to roost, sometimes after an astonishingly long interval.  The disaffection of Catholic Ireland would be quite unintelligible without the massacres of the sixteenth century and the unjust trade-legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth.  The bitterness of the working class in England has its roots in the earlier period of the industrial revolution (about 1760-1832), when the labourer, with his wife and children, was treated as the ‘cannon-fodder’ of industry.  Similarly, the seeds of Prussian brutality and aggressiveness were sown at Jena and in the raiding of Prussia for recruits before the Moscow expedition.  If such were the causes of the great world-war, how little can be hoped from courts of international arbitration!

These considerations have, perhaps, made it clear that the main causes of international conflicts are what the Epistle of St. James declares them to be—­’the lusts that war in your members,’ the pugnacious and acquisitive instincts which pervade our social life in times of peace, and not least in those nations which pride themselves on having advanced beyond the militant stage.  There are some who accept this