nced by remote events and
traditions. Nations have generic desires as well as specific ones.
They always crave empire; they all desire to have rank. They are
always ambitious, jealous and watchful of one another. These general
and more or less subconscious desires make their desires for specific
objects intense, but they also make them peculiarly irrational. The
heroic examples of history, hereditary emotions and the effects of
specific events in the history of peoples complicate their politics,
and often make rational politics impossible. Nations will not act in
their own best interests, because they are governed by irrational
motives. In this way certain disparities are often produced between
the people and their practical statesmen, but history seems to show us
that when these disparities exist in the region of fundamental desires
and policies it is the leader who must yield. History seems to show us
also that wars, coming in general out of the deeper motives of
nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the
realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and
determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb
(66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there
is something transcendental that supports them, and this
transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that
nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The
tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory;
nations also desire objects that are not useful, the worth of which
consists in their satisfaction of taste. The ambition to own colonies,
Powers thinks, is of this nature. Colonies are quite as much
ornamental as they are useful. They convey the feeling and impression
of power.

That these deep desires of nations as expressed in the ambition to
reach certain geographical objectives are exceedingly strong, often if
not always irrational, brutally arrogant and tenacious, the whole
course of history teaches us. These desires are indeed the forces
behind historical movements. They create politics and policies. War
preexists in these irrational purposes. These purposes are charged
with emotion, with prejudice, and tradition. It is with these motives
that all practical politics must contend, and these motives are the
forces that the statesman must use and make more rational.

The purposes of nations are usually if not always we say ob