ly upon stark economic
motives. Carthage and Rome did not fight for glory but for food. The
prize was the fertile wheat fields of Sicily. There was nothing
transcendental in the wars between Athens and Sparta, but a naked
conflict for commerce and exploitative dominion. As for the British
conquest of India, the "ideal of empire" was perfectly translatable
into a very acute desire for trade.

We shall make little progress unless we understand this business or
economic side of war, for to see war truly we must see it naked. All
its romanticism is but the gold lace upon the dress uniform. The
idealism of the individual is a mere derivative of those crude
appetites of the mass that drive nations into the conflict. Wherever
we open the book of history, and read of marching and counter-marching,
of {22} slaughter and rapine, we discover that the tribes, clans,
cities or nations engaged in these bloody conflicts were not fighting
for nothing, whatever they themselves may have believed, but were
impelled in the main by the hope of securing economic goods--food,
lands, slaves, trade, money.

It is a wide digression from the immediate problems of our closely knit
world of to-day to the blind, animal instincts that ruled the destinies
of endless successions of hunting tribes, exterminating each other in
the savage forest. Yet among hunting tribes, at all times, the raw
conflict of economic motive, which we find more decently garbed in
modern days, appears crude and stark. To kill or starve is the eternal
choice. Since population increases faster than food, war becomes
inevitable, for the tribe that hunts on _our_ land, and eats _our_
food, is our hereditary enemy. To pastoral nations, war is equally
necessary, unless babies and old people are to be ruthlessly
sacrificed. To fill new mouths larger flocks are necessary, to feed
larger flocks new pastures are required; and there is only one way to
obtain fresh pastures. There comes a period of drought, and the
hunger-maddened nation, accompanied by its flocks, hurls itself
suddenly upon feebler agricultural peoples, destroying empires and
founding them. These are the great _Voelkerwanderungen_, the restless
migrations of mobile pastoral nations in search of food. It is the
eternal bloody quest.

Nor are agricultural populations immune. Not only must they defend
their patches of cultivated land, but, as numbers increase, must strike
out for new lands. When the gro