u; if you want the services of
the heretic you must not kill him, and you must keep your obligation
towards him, and mutual good faith is death to long-sustained hatreds.
You cannot separate the moral from the social and economic development
of a people, and the great service of a complex social and industrial
organisation, which is built up by the desire of men for better material
conditions, is not that it "pays" but that it makes a more
interdependent human society, and that it leads men to recognise what is
the best relationship between them. And the fact of recognising that
some act of aggression is causing stocks to fall is not important
because it may save Oppenheim's or Solomon's money but because it is a
demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other
side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an
interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and
mechanical means can teach, the lesson of human fellowship.
And it is by such means as this that Western Europe has in some measure,
within its respective political frontiers, learnt that lesson. Each has
learnt, within the confines of the nation at least, that wealth is made
by work, not robbery; that, indeed, general robbery is fatal to
prosperity; that government consists not merely in having the power of
the sword but in organising society--in "knowing how"; which means the
development of ideas; in maintaining courts; in making it possible to
run railways, post offices, and all the contrivances of a complex
society.
Now rulers did not create these things; it was the daily activities of
the people, born of their desires and made possible by the circumstances
in which they lived, by the trading and the mining and the shipping
which they carried on, that made them. But the Balkans have been
geographically outside the influence of European industrial and
commercial life. The Turk has hardly felt it at all. He has learnt none
of the social and moral lessons which interdependence and improved
communications have taught the Western European, and it is because he
has not learnt these lessons, because he is a soldier and a conqueror,
to an extent and completeness that other nations of Europe lost a
generation or two since, that the Balkanese are fighting and that war is
raging.
But not merely in this larger sense, but in the more immediate, narrower
sense, are the fundamental causes of this war econo
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