Woods and Mr. Baltzly to-day, have assured
us that war is diminishing and even that the war-like spirit is
extinct. It is certainly not true that the war-like spirit is extinct,
even in the most civilised and peaceful peoples, and we need not desire
its extinction, for it is capable of transformation into shapes of the
finest use for humanity. But the vast conflagration of to-day must not
conceal from our eyes the great central fact that war is diminishing,
and will one day disappear as completely as the mediaeval scourge of
the Black Death. To reach this consummation all the best humanising and
civilising energies of mankind will be needed.
[1] It has been argued (as by Filippi Carli, _La Ricchezza e la Guerra_,
1916) that the Germans are especially unable to understand that the
prosperity of other countries is beneficial to them, whether or not
under German control, and that they differ from the English and French
in believing that economic conquests should involve political conquests.
VI
WAR AND THE BIRTH-RATE
During recent years the faith had grown among progressive persons in
various countries, not excluding Germany, that civilisation was building
up almost impassable barriers against any great war. These barriers were
thought to be of various kinds, even apart from the merely sentimental
and humanitarian developments of pacific feeling. They were especially
of an economic kind, and that on a double basis, that of Capital and
that of Labour.
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