nations, vast
commercial interests have been embarrassed, fortunes have been lost and
won on the Bourses, banks have suspended payment, some thousands have
been ruined; while the fact that the fourth and fifth nations have
actually gone to war has raised all sorts of further possibilities of
conflict, not alone in Europe, but in Asia, with remoter danger of
religious fanaticism and all its sequelae. International bitterness and
suspicion in general have been intensified, and the one certain result
of the whole thing is that immense burdens will be added in the shape
of further taxation for armaments to the already heavy ones carried by
the five or six nations concerned. For two or three hundred millions of
people in Europe life, which with all the problems of high prices,
labor wars, unsolved social difficulties, is none too easy as it is,
will be made harder still.

The needs, therefore, that can have provoked a conflict of these
dimensions must be "primordial" indeed. In fact, one authority assures
us that what we have seen going on is "the struggle for life among
men"--that struggle which has its parallel in the whole of sentient
existence.

Well, I put it to you, as a matter worth just a moment or two of
consideration, that this conflict is about nothing of the sort; that it
is about a perfectly futile matter, one which the immense majority of
the German, English, French, Italian, and Turkish people could afford
to treat with the completest indifference. For, to the vast majority of
these 250,000,000 people, more or less, it does not matter two straws
whether Morocco or some vague, African swamp near the Equator is
administered by German, French, Italian, or Turkish officials, so long
as it is well administered. Or rather one should go further: if French,
German, or Italian colonization of the past is any guide, the nation
which wins in the conquest for territory of this sort has added a
wealth-draining incubus.

This, of course, is preposterous; I am losing sight of the need for
making provision for the future expansion of the race, of each party
desiring to "find its place in the sun"; and heaven knows what.

Well, let us for a moment get away from phrases and examine a few facts
usually ignored because they happen to be beneath our nose.

France has got a new empire, we are told; she has won a great victory;
she is growing and expanding and is richer by something which her
rivals are the poorer for not hav