savage.
Human nature is at once sublime and horrible, holy and satanic. Apart
from the accumulation of knowledge and experience, which are external
and precarious acquisitions, there is no proof that we have changed much
since the first stone age.

The war itself, as we shall soon be compelled to recognise, had its
roots deep in the political and social structure of Europe. The growth
of wealth and population, and the law of diminishing returns, led to a
scramble for unappropriated lands producing the raw materials of
industry. It was, in a sense, a war of capital; but capitalism is no
accretion upon the body politic; it is the creator of the modern world
and an essential part of a living organism. The Germans unquestionably
made a deep-laid plot to capture all markets and cripple or ruin all
competitors. Their aims and methods were very like those of the Standard
Oil Trust on a still larger scale. The other nations had not followed
the logic of competition in the same ruthless manner; there were several
things which they were not willing to do. But war to the knife cannot be
confined to one of the combatants; the alternative, _Weltmacht oder
Niedergang_, was thrust by Germany upon the Allies when she chose that
motto for herself. If the modern man were as much dominated by economic
motives as is sometimes supposed, the suicidal results of such a
conflict would have been apparent to all; but the poetry and idealism of
human nature, no longer centred, as formerly, in religion, had gathered
round a romantic patriotism, for which the belligerents were willing to
sacrifice their all without counting the cost. Like other idealisms,
patriotism varies from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

But there was another cause which led to the war. Germany was a curious
combination of seventeenth century theory and very modern practice. An
Emperor ruling by divine right was the head of the most scientific state
that the world has seen. In many ways Germany, with an intelligent,
economical, and uncorrupt Government, was a model to the rest of the
world. But the whole structure was menaced by that form of
individualistic materialism which calls itself social democracy, and
which in practice is at once the copy of organic materialism and the
reaction against it. The motives for drilling a whole nation in the
pursuit of purely national and purely materialistic aims are not strong
enough to prevent disintegration. The German _Kriegsstaa