a that the groups we call nations must be in
conflict because they struggle together for bread and the means of
sustenance is demonstrated immediately when we recall the simple facts
of historical development. When, in the British Islands, the men of
Wessex were fighting with the men of Sussex, far more frequently and
bitterly than today the men of Germany fight with those of France, or
either with those of Russia, the separate States which formed the island
were struggling with one another for sustenance, just as the tribes
which inhabited the North American Continent at the time of our arrival
there were struggling with one another for the game and hunting grounds.
It was in both cases ultimately a "struggle for bread."

At that time, when Britain was composed of several separate States, that
struggled thus with one another for land and food, it supported with
great difficulty anything between one and two million inhabitants, just
as the vast spaces now occupied by the United States supported about a
hundred thousand, often subject to famine, frequently suffering great
shortage of food, able to secure just the barest existence of the
simplest kind.

Today, although Britain supports anything from twenty to forty times,
and North America something like a thousand times, as large a population
in much greater comfort, with no period of famine, with the whole
population living much more largely and deriving much more from the soil
than did the men of the Heptarchy, or the Red Indians, the "struggle for
bread" does not now take the form of struggle between groups of the
population. The more they fought, the less efficiently did they support
themselves; the less they fought one another, the more efficiently did
they all support themselves.

This simple illustration is at least proof of this, that the struggle
for material things did not involve any necessary struggle between the
separate groups or States; for those material things are given in
infinitely greater abundance when the States cease to struggle.
Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those conflicts, that origin was
not any inevitable conflict in the exploitation of the earth. If those
conflicts were concerned with material things at all, they arose from a
mistake about the best means of obtaining them, exploiting the earth,
and ceased when those concerned realized the mistake.

Just as Britain supported its population better when Englishmen gave up
fighting b