rial war will take over the territory of the
loser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the
waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two
empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Both
will possess an armament which represents the whole 'surplus value,'
beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will contain
white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a
wavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and,
as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will
exist. 'Imperial egoism,' having worked itself out to its logical
conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the
globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider
the problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from
the point of view of mere humanitarianism.

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we might
begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further? Fifteen
hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian
opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians.
The generals and other 'Real-politiker' on both sides may have feared,
like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become 'too cosmopolitan,'
too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology.
'This' a Homoousian may have said 'is a practical matter. Unless our
side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the
other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.' And yet we can now
see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned
with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously
concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or
'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy
metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the
continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no
longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching
towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire'
like 'Homoousia' and 'Homoiousia' are the best that we can do in making
entities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe,
and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up within
them?

I have already urged, when considering the conditions o