“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 because the elements of progress are latent in them.  Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.  “War,” says A. W. von Schlegel, “is as necessary as the struggle of the elements in Nature.”

Now, it is, of course, an obvious fact that a peaceful rivalry may exist between peoples and States, like that between the fellow-members of a society, in all departments of civilized life—­a struggle which need not always degenerate Into war.  Struggle and war are not identical.  This rivalry, however, does not take place under the same conditions as the intrasocial struggle, and therefore cannot lead to the same results.  Above the rivalry of individuals and groups within the State stands the law, which takes care that injustice is kept within bounds, and that the right shall prevail.  Behind the law stands the State, armed with power, which it employs, and rightly so, not merely to protect, but actively to promote, the moral and spiritual interests of society.  But there is no impartial power that stands above the rivalry of States to restrain injustice, and to use that rivalry with conscious purpose to promote the highest ends of mankind.  Between States the only check on injustice is force, and in morality and civilization each people must play its own part