But in spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in determining the politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of errors which may be fatal in practice.

The most obvious non-economic factor, and the one the neglect of which has led Socialists most astray, is nationalism.  Of course a nation, once formed, has economic interests which largely determine its politics; but it is not, as a rule, economic motives that decide what group of human beings shall form a nation.  Trieste, before the war, considered itself Italian, although its whole prosperity as a port depended upon its belonging to Austria.  No economic motive can account for the opposition between Ulster and the rest of Ireland.  In Eastern Europe, the Balkanization produced by self-determination has been obviously disastrous from an economic point of view, and was demanded for reasons which were in essence sentimental.  Throughout the war wage-earners, with only a few exceptions, allowed themselves to be governed by nationalist feeling, and ignored the traditional Communist exhortation:  “Workers of the world, unite.”  According to Marxian orthodoxy, they were misled by cunning capitalists, who made their profit out of the slaughter.  But to any one capable of observing psychological facts, it is obvious that this is largely a myth.  Immense numbers of capitalists were ruined by the war; those who were young were just as liable to be killed as the proletarians were.  No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal to do with causing the war; but rivalry is a different thing from profit-seeking.  Probably by combination English and German capitalists could have made more than they did out of rivalry, but the rivalry was instinctive, and its economic form was accidental.  The capitalists were in the grip of nationalist instinct as much as their proletarian “dupes.”  In both classes some have gained by the war; but the universal will to war was not produced by the hope of gain.  It was produced by a different set of instincts, and one which Marxian psychology fails to recognize adequately.

The Marxian assumes that a man’s “herd,” from the point of view of herd-instinct, is his class, and that he will combine with those whose economic class-interest is the same as his.  This is only very partially true in fact.  Religion has been the most decisive factor in determining a man’s herd throughout long periods of the world’s history.  Even now a Catholic working man will vote for a Catholic capitalist rather than for an unbelieving Socialist.  In America the divisions in local elections are mainly on religious lines.  This is no doubt convenient for the capitalists, and tends to make them religious men; but the capitalists alone could not produce the result.  The result is produced by the fact that many working men prefer the advancement of their creed to the improvement of their livelihood.  However deplorable such a state of mind may be, it is not necessarily due to capitalist lies.