This simple illustration is at least proof of this, that the struggle for material things did not involve any necessary struggle between the separate groups or States; for those material things are given in infinitely greater abundance when the States cease to struggle.  Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those conflicts, that origin was not any inevitable conflict in the exploitation of the earth.  If those conflicts were concerned with material things at all, they arose from a mistake about the best means of obtaining them, exploiting the earth, and ceased when those concerned realized the mistake.

Just as Britain supported its population better when Englishmen gave up fighting between themselves, so the world as a whole could support its population better if it gave up fighting.

Moreover, we have passed out of the stage when we could massacre a conquered population to make room for us.  When we conquer an inferior people like the Filipinos, we don’t exterminate them, we give them an added chance of life.  The weakest don’t go to the wall.

But at this point parenthetically I want to enter a warning.  You may say, if this notion of the rivalry of nations is false, how do you account for the fact of its playing so large a part in the present war?

Well, that is easily explained—­men are not guided necessarily by their interest even in their soberest moments, but by what they believe to be their interest.  Men do not judge from the facts, but from what they believe to be the facts.  War is the “failure of human understanding.”  The religious wars were due to the belief that two religions could not exist side by side.  It was not true, but the false belief provoked the wars.  Our notions as to the relation of political power to a nation’s prosperity are just as false, and this fallacy, like the older one, plays its part in the causation of war.

Now, let us for a moment apply the very general rule thus revealed to the particular case of the United States at this present juncture.

American merchants may in certain cases, if they are shrewd and able, do a very considerably increased trade, though it is just as certain that other merchants will be losing trade, and I think there is pretty general agreement that as a matter of simple fact the losses of the war so far have for America very considerably and very obviously overbalanced the gains.  The loss has been felt so tangibly by the United States Government, for instance, that a special loan had to be voted in order to stop some of the gaps.  Whole States, whose interests are bound up with staples like cotton, were for a considerable time threatened with something resembling commercial paralysis.