There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars—­Religious wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition and Profit—­though in any particular case the four species may be more or less mingled.  The religious and the race motives often go together; but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is not so very dominant.  Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are, however, still common enough.  Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the mass-peoples themselves.  The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife.  Why, then, do wars occur?  It is because the urge to war comes, not from the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it.  In every nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found, beside the toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the Military, and the Commercial.  It was so in far-back ancient India; it is so now.  Each of these classes endeavours in its turn—­as one might expect—­to become the ruling class and to run the government of the nation.  The governments of the nations thus become class-governments.  And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own, alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it going.

In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the mere existence of Class, in itself.  In a sense that is a perfectly natural thing.  There are different divisions of human activity, and it is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to a certain activity—­literary or religious or mercantile or military or what not—­should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite organs.  And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy provided the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation.  But if the class does not subordinate itself to the general welfare, if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the nation for its own uses—­if it becomes parasitical, in fact—­then it and the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body’s needs, become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system.

It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the horrors and follies of war.  And the horrors and follies of war are the working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been festering within.  How many times in the history of “civilization” has a bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a greedy commercial gang—­caring not one jot for the welfare of the people committed to its charge—­dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests!  It is here and in this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the “explanation” of the wars of to-day.