ery feudal
society. A money economy, a conversion of values into money, changes
the technique of war by creating professional mercenary armies. But
the business goes on as before. Rival groups fight for a monopoly of
trade as they once fought for land. There is still not enough to go
around, and no way of deciding between rival claimants except by the
arbitrament of war.

Perhaps it will be objected that an analysis of war such as this leaves
us merely with the dead body of facts while killing the soul of truth.
Surely, it may be urged, war is more than a sordid calculation; a
Roland or Bayard does not weigh his danger against booty. Of course
that is so. Economic motive is only the skeleton of war; the flesh and
skin are of a totally different texture. Idealism, nobility, heroism
exist in war, and are no less sincere because based upon the gross
facts of economic necessity and desire. Without such idealism,
manufactured or evolved, you can no more win wars, especially in these
latter days, than without ammunition. Idealism is a weapon with which
we kill our enemies. Yet if we read our history rightly, we shall find
less of this luminous nobility among warriors than our annalists
pretend. The Greeks of the Trojan War were not patriots but
free-booters. Those great English sailors, Drake, Morgan and the rest,
who ravaged the Caribbean and smashed the Spanish sea-power, were
pirates, unashamed of their piracy. As for the heroic warriors of the
Scotch border, would they not to-day be {25} jailed as cattle-thieves?
Look where you will, at the great wars and at the blood-tracked
colonising movements of history, and always you will find two kinds of
men: the stone-blind idealist, and the crass, open-eyed, fleshly man.
One fights for ideals, the other for something else worth fighting for.
Both, however, are in reality impelled by economic motive, working upon
them either directly and consciously, or transmuted into ideals through
the medium of a people's thought.

Nor does this fighting for things, to be obtained only by fighting,
involve moral turpitude. Nothing could be more grotesque than the
moralistic tone in which we industrious moderns lecture the ancient
fighting peoples. They did what we do, gained the things they wanted
in the only way they could. Men will fight or work rather than starve,
and whether they fight or work depends upon which, in the given
circumstances, is the feasible mode of accumul