A nation, a people, we are given to understand, have higher motives than money, or “self-interest.”  What do we mean when we speak of the money of a nation, or the self-interest of a community?  We mean—­and in such a discussion as this can mean nothing else—­better conditions for the great mass of the people, the fullest possible lives, the abolition or attenuation of poverty and of narrow circumstances, that the millions shall be better housed and clothed and fed, capable of making provision for sickness and old age, with lives prolonged and cheered—­and not merely this, but also that they shall be better educated, with character disciplined by steady labour and a better use of leisure, a general social atmosphere which shall make possible family affection, individual dignity and courtesy and the graces of life, not alone among the few, but among the many.

Now, do these things constitute as a national policy an inspiring aim or not?  Yet they are, speaking in terms of communities, pure self-interest—­all bound up with economic problems, with money.  Does Admiral Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to such efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a mercenary individual?  Would he have us believe that the typical great movements of our times—­Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism, Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation, Improved Education—­bound up as they all are with economic problems—­are not the sort of objects which more and more are absorbing the best activities of Christendom?

I have attempted to show that the activities which lie outside the range of these things—­the religious wars, movements like those which promoted the Crusades, or the sort of tradition which we associate with the duel (which has, in fact, disappeared from Anglo-Saxon society)—­do not and cannot any longer form part of the impulse creating the long-sustained conflicts between large groups which a European war implies, partly because such allied moral differences as now exist do not in any way coincide with the political divisions, but intersect them, and partly because in the changing character of men’s ideals there is a distinct narrowing of the gulf which is supposed to separate ideal and material aims.  Early ideals, whether in the field of politics or religion, are generally dissociated from any aim of general well-being.  In early politics ideals are concerned simply with personal allegiance to some dynastic chief, a feudal lord or a monarch.  The well-being of a community does not enter into the matter at all:  it is the personal allegiance which matters.  Later the chief must embody in his person that well-being, or he does not achieve the allegiance of a community of any enlightenment; later, the well-being of the community becomes the end in itself without being embodied in the person of an hereditary chief, so that the community realise that their efforts, instead of being directed