ave been due to the
twists and turns given to the economic instinct by forces that were not
economic. For instance, this theory traces the French war of Edward
III to a quarrel about the French wines. Any one who has even smelt the
Middle Ages must feel fifty answers spring to his lips; but in this case
one will suffice. There would have been no such war, then, if we all
drank water like cows. But when one is a man one enters the world
of historic choice. The act of drinking wine is one that requires
explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.

But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.

When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago,
an ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said
that they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was
eagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do
not see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable
uprisings in history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is
generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on
the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from
captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula
(arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic
shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for
a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt
employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of
making bricks with nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic
intellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange and
unnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open, there
can be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather. Such a climate
notoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr.
Kipling describes. And it was while their brains were disordered by the
heat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation, that they
were led by a prophet, and, in short, that they were going to be of some
importance in the affairs of the world.

Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy was
pulled down in August; and that August is a month in summer.

In spite of all this, however, I have some little difficulty myself
in accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (at
these words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their h