locality, of your habits and traditions, but of theirs. Not the desire
of nationality, but the desire to destroy nationality is what makes the
wars of nationality. If the Germans did not think that the retention of
Polish or Alsatian nationality might hamper them in the art of war,
hamper them in the imposition of force on some other groups, there would
be no attempt to crush out this special possession of the Poles and
Alsatians. It is the belief in force and a preference for settling
things by force instead of by agreement that threatens or destroys
nationality. And I have given an indication of the fact that it is not
merely war, but the preparation for war, implying as it does great
homogeneity in states and centralised bureaucratic control, which is
to-day the great enemy of nationality. Before this tendency to
centralisation which military necessity sets up much that gives colour
and charm to European life is disappearing. And yet we are told that it
is the Pacifists who are the enemy of nationality, and we are led to
believe that in some way the war system in Europe stands for the
preservation of nationality!

[Footnote 3: Review of Reviews, November, 1912.]

[Footnote 4: In the "Daily Mail," to whose Editor I am indebted for
permission to reprint it.]

CHAPTER IV.

TURKISH IDEALS IN OUR POLITICAL THOUGHT.

This war and "the Turks of Britain and Prussia"--The Anglo-Saxon and
opposed ideals--Mr. C. Chesterton's case for "killing and being killed"
as the best method of settling differences--Its application to Civil
Conflicts--As in Spanish-America--The difference between Devonshire and
Venezuela--Will the Balkans adopt the Turco-Venezuelan political ideals
or the British?

An English political writer remarked, on it becoming evident that the
Christian States were driving back the Turks: "This is a staggering blow
to _all_ the Turks--those of England and Prussia as well as those of
Turkey."

But, of course, the British and Prussian Turks will never see it--like
the Bourbons, they learn not. Here is a typically military system, the
work of "born fighters" which has gone down in welter before the
assaults of much less military States, the chief of which, indeed, has
grown up in what Captain von Herbert has called, with some contempt,
"stagnant and enfeebling peace conditions," formed by the people whom
the Turks regarded as quite unfit to be made into warriors; whom they
regarded much as some Europeans