t and honour,
envy and the thirst for revenge--determine men's actions. Still more
often, perhaps, it is the need to live which brings down even natures of
a higher mould into the universal struggle for existence and enjoyment.

There can be no doubt on this point. The nation is made up of
individuals, the State of communities. The motive which influences each
member is prominent in the whole body. It is a persistent struggle for
possessions, power, and sovereignty, which primarily governs the
relations of one nation to another, and right is respected so far only
as it is compatible with advantage. So long as there are men who have
human feelings and aspirations, so long as there are nations who strive
for an enlarged sphere of activity, so long will conflicting interests
come into being and occasions for making war arise.

"The natural law, to which all laws of Nature can be reduced, is the law
of struggle. All intrasocial property, all thoughts, inventions, and
institutions, as, indeed, the social system itself, are a result of the
intrasocial struggle, in which one survives and another is cast out. The
extrasocial, the supersocial, struggle which guides the external
development of societies, nations, and races, is war. The internal
development, the intrasocial struggle, is man's daily work--the struggle
of thoughts, feelings, wishes, sciences, activities. The outward
development, the supersocial struggle, is the sanguinary struggle of
nations--war. In what does the creative power of this struggle consist?
In growth and decay, in the victory of the one factor and in the defeat
of the other! This struggle is a creator, since it eliminates." [B]

[Footnote B: Clauss Wagner, "Der Krieg als schaffendes Weltprinzip."]

That social system in which the most efficient personalities possess the
greatest influence will show the greatest vitality in the intrasocial
struggle. In the extrasocial struggle, in war, that nation will conquer
which can throw into the scale the greatest physical, mental, moral,
material, and political power, and is therefore the best able to defend
itself. War will furnish such a nation with favourable vital conditions,
enlarged possibilities of expansion and widened influence, and thus
promote the progress of mankind; for it is clear that those intellectual
and moral factors which insure superiority in war are also those which
render possible a general progressive development. They confer victory
be