ation. Perhaps these
peoples loved fighting and praised fighting more than we do. But as
fighting was their _metier_ and the measure of their success, their
minds, like their muscles, became habituated, and their morality
discovered virtue to be the thing at which the moralists were adept.
Nothing can be wrong that is necessary to survival. Warfare is not
immoral until there is an alternative.

Such an alternative might easily have arisen with the vast impetus
given to accumulation by the discovery of America and of the new route
to the East. But these events not only did not end but actually
intensified war, while bringing out more sharply its preponderatingly
economic character. For three generations Europe was enmeshed in the
Italian wars, in which great rival nations sought to control Italian
wealth and the dominion of the Mediterranean. There followed the
so-called religious {26} wars, in which Sweden played for control of
the Baltic, Holland for the East Indian colonies, and England for trade
supremacy, while Catholic France, to strengthen her position at the
expense of Austria, came to the aid of Protestant Germany. For another
century, from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Peace of Paris in
1763, there was a succession of commercial wars, in which England
wrested from Holland and then from France the mastery of the sea as
well as the control of Asia and America. During all this period the
rising commercial classes of England were brutally "upon the make."
Markets were gained in America and valuable commercial rights obtained
from Portugal, while in the famous contract, known as the "_Assiento_,"
English merchants secured from Spain the lucrative privilege of
shipping one hundred and forty-four thousand negro slaves to the
Spanish colonies of America. Of such was the texture of the complex
European diplomacy that held the world in war.

In all these conflicts there was precious little idealism. The astute
councillors of Elizabeth, of James, of Louis XIV, did not waste their
august sovereign's time upon discourses concerning Britain's honour and
the grandeur of France, but talked trade, privileges, monopolies,
colonies to be exploited, money to be made. So too the Napoleonic
Wars, those great conflicts between democracy and absolutism, reveal
themselves as a continuation of the commercial wars of the eighteenth
century. It was all the same process, the ranging of the nations, as
formerly of tri