The War revealed the fact that all nations have their militarists. Militarism, instead of being the cause of war, is a necessity of war. If war is made why should it not be absolute war? "For people in this country to talk of the sanctity of international law is nothing but hypocrisy or ignorance," writes Major Stewart Murray. It is childish to suppose that all the men of any nation love war for its own sake. Every ilati0n making war must apply the methods of militarism, though their application is repugnant and detestable to the mass of mankind. The ultimate strategy of militarism has been said to involve that, "the people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war." We have seen that the force that can readily and consciously reduce mankind to such depths of brutality and anguish, is not in itself the cause of war. It is the necessary and indispensable instrument of war. Why do the nations bear the burden of armaments and organise for mutual destruction? Not because some are good and others morally inferior. Substantially, the morality of nations is on a footing of equality. The nations are armed because the few have much to defend, and having economic power, are masters of the majority. Being armed, and as war is a science, they have perforce advanced from the simple stage of organisation when war is a leisurely affair, to the complex and highly developed stage we know as militarism.
(d) CAPITALISM.
On the acquisition of Colonies and the pursuit of war in protection of trade, capitalist opinion in Great Britain has undergone a radical change. Until forty years ago, though all through the nineteenth century Britain waged a succession of minor wars against Asiatic and African races, the dominant opinion in Liberalism favored peaceful penetration for the encouragement of trade. The destruction of self-government in Egypt by British arms, in the avowed interest of the Bondholders, is the point when capitalist pacific Liberalism of the nineteenth century, passes over to the Imperialist capitalism of our own day. The reasons for that change explain the course of world politics during the last four decades.
In capitalist society,—that is to say, in a society like our own, where land and the instruments of wealth production—tools and machines—are the private property of persons who
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