Another instinct which has supplied fuel to patriotism of the baser sort is that of acquisitiveness.  This tendency, without which even the most rudimentary civilisation would be impossible, began when the female of the species, instead of carrying her baby on her back and following the male to his hunting-grounds, made some sort of a lair for herself and her family, where primitive implements and stores of food could be kept.  There are still tribes in Brazil which have not reached this first step towards humanisation.  But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution—­that of plunder and brigandage.  In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which, unlike most other desires, knows no satiety.  The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.  The acquisition and possession of land satisfies this desire in a high degree, since land is a visible and indestructible form of property.  Consequently, as soon as the instincts of the individual are transferred to the group, territorial aggrandisement becomes a main preoccupation of the state.  This desire was the chief cause of wars, while kings and nobles regarded the territories over which they ruled as their private estates.  Wherever despotic or feudal conditions survive, such ideas are likely still to be found, and to cause dangers to other states.  The greatest ambition of a modern emperor is still to be commemorated as a ‘Mehrer des Reichs.’

Capitalism, by separating the idea of property from any necessary connection with landed estate, and democracy, by denying the whole theory on which dynastic wars of conquest are based, have both contributed to check this, perhaps the worst kind of war.  It would, however, be a great error to suppose that the instinct of acquisitiveness, in its old and barbarous form, has lost its hold upon even the most civilised nations.  When an old-fashioned brigand appears, and puts himself at the head of his nation, he becomes at once a popular hero.  By any rational standard of morality, few greater scoundrels have lived than Frederick the Great and Napoleon I. But they are still names to conjure with.  Both were men of singularly lucid intellect and entirely medieval ambitions.  Their great achievement was to show how under modern conditions aggressive war may be carried on without much loss (except in human life) to the aggressor.  They tore up all the conventions which regulated the conduct of warfare, and reduced it to sheer brigandage and terrorism.  And now, after a hundred years, we see these methods deliberately revived by the greatest military power in the world, and applied with the same ruthlessness and with an added pedantry which makes them more inhuman.  The perpetrators of the crime calculated quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse.  It must, indeed, be a bad cause that cannot count on the support of the large majority of the people at the beginning of a war.  Pugnacity, greed, mere excitement, the contagion of a crowd, will fill the streets of almost any capital with a shouting and jubilant mob on the day after a war has been declared.