t remain unchanged, so long as
they are dominated by existing illusions.

* * * * *

In a paper read before the British Association of this year, I attempted
to show in more general terms this relation between economic impulse and
ideal motive. The following are relevant passages:--

A nation, a people, we are given to understand, have higher motives than
money, or "self-interest." What do we mean when we speak of the money of
a nation, or the self-interest of a community? We mean--and in such a
discussion as this can mean nothing else--better conditions for the
great mass of the people, the fullest possible lives, the abolition or
attenuation of poverty and of narrow circumstances, that the millions
shall be better housed and clothed and fed, capable of making provision
for sickness and old age, with lives prolonged and cheered--and not
merely this, but also that they shall be better educated, with character
disciplined by steady labour and a better use of leisure, a general
social atmosphere which shall make possible family affection, individual
dignity and courtesy and the graces of life, not alone among the few,
but among the many.

Now, do these things constitute as a national policy an inspiring
aim or not? Yet they are, speaking in terms of communities, pure
self-interest--all bound up with economic problems, with money. Does
Admiral Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to
such efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a
mercenary individual? Would he have us believe that the typical great
movements of our times--Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism,
Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation,
Improved Education--bound up as they all are with economic problems--are
not the sort of objects which more and more are absorbing the best
activities of Christendom?

I have attempted to show that the activities which lie outside the range
of these things--the religious wars, movements like those which promoted
the Crusades, or the sort of tradition which we associate with the duel
(which has, in fact, disappeared from Anglo-Saxon society)--do not and
cannot any longer form part of the impulse creating the long-sustained
conflicts between large groups which a European war implies, partly
because such allied moral differences as now exist do not in any way
coincide with the political divisions, but intersect them, and partly