any is the heart of Europe, surrounded by
countries that were once a part of Germany and will be again.

German education, we say, seems to be unique in the extent to which it
influences public sentiment and national conduct. In general,
education has appeared among the influences that lead to war rather by
default of positive teaching than by anything positive it has done.
Even in Germany, we should say, the spirit of war has been made to
flourish less by the teaching of a narrow nationalism, by inculcating
hatred, and implanting wrong conceptions of German history than by
failing to provide youth with means of deep satisfaction, by failing
to coordinate deep desires of the individual, and to organize
individuals in a normal social life. This is true everywhere.
Education has not affected life as a whole, and it has not thus far
been an influence which, to any appreciable extent, has accelerated
the development of peoples in their especially national aspects and
relations. It has nowhere fostered any conception of the whole world
as an object of social feeling. It has everywhere accepted a certain
provincialism as natural and necessary, and has tacitly assumed that
national boundaries are the horizon of the practical life of the
child. The school has in fact failed to take advantage of its
unmatched opportunity to use the imagination of the child to develop
his social powers. Sociologists say that if sociologists had been more
diligent in spreading abroad information about the social life, the
great war would perhaps never have happened. That we may certainly
doubt; something more profound must be done by education than to
disseminate knowledge, if it would undertake to be a power in the
world and to do anything more than add its influence to the tendencies
of the day, or perhaps temporarily change the direction of these
tendencies.

CHAPTER IX

ECONOMIC FACTORS AND MOTIVES

Thus far we have considered the motives of war mainly from the
psychological point of view, discovering its main movement and
development in the world to be a product of the psychic forces in the
social order. This method, however, did not exclude the objective
facts, and did not ignore the practical motives. We found that war is
a manifestation of many tendencies, and in fact is related to all the
deep movements in the life of society and of the individual. War comes
out of the whole of life in a way to preclude the interpretation of