lomatic speeches and notes may have told the world, and however much historians may have embellished the simple fact of "acquisition" and the taking of the "neighbours' land for pasture and tillage," the bottom fact remains that from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to our own enrichment has been the object of war.
But just because this is an elementary and simple fact, it does not explain everything about war. The "we" who go to war and "acquire" will be different in different times, and the forms and the precise objects of acquisition will be different also. Those who go to acquire the neighbours' country in the degenerated republic of Plato will be a totally different set of people from those who proceed to the performance of a similar act under the Third French Republic, and the pastures and the tilled fields in the one case will obviously be dissimilar as an object of acquisition to the Moroccan mines and Tunisian phosphate fields in the other. Everything changes with the state and composition of society. Nebuchadnezzar had one conception of what there was to be acquired in the neighbours' country, and the modern capitalist class has another conception of the same thing; and while—to quote an instance in this present war—the Russians' first act when they established themselves in Galicia was to appoint a large number of officials and to initiate a scheme for the distrubution of the lands among prospective peasant immigrants, the Germans' first act, when they came to Poland, was to set the mines and factories working. So much in the "art of acquisition," of which the " "art of war"" is, by nature, a part, depends upon the state of society even in the same war and in the same historical period.
In our time of very much advanced capitalism, this art of acquisition bears a peculiar impress which sharply distinguishes it even from that which immediately preceded it at an earlier stage of capitalist advance. "We" used to acquire markets for goods. That was very recently—so recently that many of us still speak of wars as being, by nature, part of the art of acquiring markets for our Manchester, or Birmingham, or Sheffield ware. But that stage, in which the proverbial missionary with the Bible and the trader with the bottle were the first performers, to be followed by a punitive force under the Union Jack, is really gone and buried. We live in a different age, the age of finance which seeks concessions and investments. At home we have filled
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