by army discipline to martial intoxication. Had
it not been for a real sense of insecurity, however, peaceable Germans
would have been less receptive to such martial ideas. For a generation
after 1870 Germany, though armed, had been pacific because secure; her
economic centre of gravity lay within. It was not until her national
interests extended beyond her boundaries that this sense of insecurity
arose. Pan-Germanism was the intellectual and emotional expression of
an economic malaise.

To boycott Germany after the war will neither decrease her anxiety nor
improve the prospects of peace in Europe. Such a "war after the war,"
as it is now proposed, is a flat denial of the economic interdependence
of nations. Its obvious result would be to intensify, rather than
moderate, the industrial competition. Driven from the markets of the
allies, Germany would be forced to dump her goods into all neutral
countries (at the expense of the trade of the boycotting nations), as
well as to form a counter economic alliance and if possible a military
coalition. A permanent economic injury to the Central Powers would at
the first convenient moment provoke military retaliation. And,
parenthetically, a nation like Germany, with its growing population and
resources, cannot remain crushed. Even if too weak to make headway
against a powerful group of nations, it will always be strong enough to
act as a make-weight between two opposed coalitions. {274} Thus if
England and Russia, no longer united by a common peril, were to clash
in the Mediterranean or in Persia, the presence of an economically
threatened and therefore bellicose Germany would tend to precipitate
hostilities. If a boycotted Germany by an economic or military
alliance could detach one or more of her present enemies, the
international situation created would be as dangerous as that of
1914.[2]

The argument that economic insecurity does not tend toward war is thus
seen to halt on all fours. There is, however, a stronger or at least a
more obvious argument against the promotion of economic
internationalism. It is the claim that wars are caused by
nationalistic strife. If the incessant struggle between nationalities
cannot be appeased but must lead again and again to world-wide wars,
then it is futile to seek to avert war by the creation of an economic
internationalism. No agreement among the great nations about trade or
colonies will avail so long as Poles, Bulga