atest war machines are maintained by the
greatest industrial nations. To reply that they have the big war
machines because they can afford to pay for them, is no conclusive
answer. The organizing of nations for war came into present-day society
with the present industrial system. Industrial leaders have engaged in a
great competitive struggle from which the final appeal was always the
appeal to arms. Furthermore, one of the most profitable businesses has
been that of making the munitions and supplies required for the
prosecution of war. Nor is there wanting evidence that modern wars have
been made for profits--that they have been "commercial wars," as
President Wilson put it.

There is no longer any question but that the forces behind the world war
were in the main economic. The war was fought by capitalist empires, for
the furtherance of capitalist enterprises. The publication of the secret
treaties entered into by the Allies in 1916 gives conclusive proof of
the land grabbing character of the Allies' intentions. There can
scarcely be any question of the existence of similar intentions on the
side of the Central Empires. The forces that constituted the war menace
in 1914 were the economic forces arising out of the competitive economic
regime that dominated the European world at that time.

Since the ending of the war, these forces have been augmented rather
than abated. To them there must be added the other element of danger
that threatens to throw Europe again into turmoil. Soviet Russia is and
for a time must remain a source of international bitterness among the
great capitalist nations, while the struggle for the control of the Near
East is fraught with consequences as momentous as was the pre-war German
dream of a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. Unrest in Egypt, India,
Korea, and the other countries held in subjection by the power of the
bayonet; the contest between Japan, Britain and the United States for
the control of the Pacific and the exploitation of China; the unrest and
revolution that are stirring in China; the keen intensity of the
struggle for foreign markets and for such strategic resources as the
supply of petroleum, are all suggestive of a situation resembling an
open gasoline can surrounded by lighted matches. And to add the last,
and the most realistic touch to the picture, there are a million more
men under arms in Europe than there were in 1913, while the military and
naval authorities in all of