nations have for their
commerce, quite out of relation to present needs and conditions, hark
back to an old romance of the sea. The waterways of the world, the
islands and new continents have a traditional appeal, which comes down
to us from the days when the small countries of Europe, one after
another--Portugal, Holland, Spain, England--became great in wealth,
and grew to be world powers, by their commerce and their colonial
possessions. In those days the expansion of nations was not at all due
to economic pressure at home. The landowners, the rules, the
privileged class in general were interested in colonies, because in
that direction stretched the path to fabulous wealth, and because over
the seas were the lands of adventure. The seeking of colonies was both
the business and the pleasure of the nations. To-day the gaining of
colonies may be only a loss to nations economically, but they satisfy
the craving for visible empire, and also a longing that is deep and
intense because tradition and romance are deeply embedded in it.

Probably no one now believes that war among modern nations is due to a
pure predatory instinct or to a migratory instinct which is supposed
to have led primitive hordes to seek new habitats and to prey upon
other peoples. Hunger does not now drive people in companies from
their homes and pour them into other lands, although it is true that
any threat which excites the old hunger-fear tends to arouse the war
spirit and to stir the migratory impulse; and a deep sensitiveness to
climatic conditions and a claustrophobia of peoples have remained long
after the need of land urged as the main cause of war, and we hear war
justified on the ground that crowded peoples require more land. This
_land hunger_ is an old motive and it still remains deep in the
consciousness of peoples long after its economic significance has
ceased. Just as we say the threat of hunger is often imagined, and the
fear of hunger and a deep and persistent fear of peoples and the sense
of danger of being engulfed and destroyed by other peoples linger in
consciousness, so the consciousness of the old struggle for land
remains as one of the most powerful of traditions, and any threat,
near or remote, to a nation's land arouses all the forces of the war
spirit, and the thought of aggression as a means of conquest of land
is always alluring.

Land was once the main possession and the main need. To-day it is the
chief symbol of the po