But the true method of judging an event is to exercise comparison, taking into account a far greater mass of social phenomena than that of the immediate present. Now the careful study of past history has proved that an outbreak of militant fraternity, combined with indulgence in the principle of enmity, leaves a society less fraternal than before in regard to the labours of peace and of building up; and against the claim that military training is a good preparation for civic life there lies the whole testimony of civilization. Further, the survival of militancy frustrates the solving of our great social problems, and the recent relapse to the militarist ideal is a grave hindrance to that social science which would provide the true ways of humanizing defective types. (I refer my reader for a fuller statement on these lines to Mr. J. M. Robertson’s _Patriotism and Empire_.) “After Waterloo,” says Mr. Robertson, “it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe that militarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant on them.” Nevertheless, they reappeared, as we know, galvanized into fatal activity in human affairs, at the close of the nineteenth century. Again, the action of international capitalism and the ideal of imperialism have been analysed from the standpoint of social philosophy by Mr. J. A. Hobson, an advanced and logical thinker on economic questions. His conclusion is that the driving forces of aggressive imperialism are the organized influences of certain professional and commercial classes which have definite economic advantages to gain by assuming a spurious patriotism, and the most potent of all these influences emanates from the financier. The power of financiers, exerted directly upon politicians and indirectly through the press upon public opinion, is, perhaps, so says Mr. Hobson, the most serious problem in public life to-day.[5] Footnote 5: The _Contemporary Review_ of January, 1900. It is not by sanguinary conflicts in which victory turns on superior numbers, superior arms, and superior cunning in military tactics, that a nation’s greatness is built up at this period of the world’s history. What progress demands is not more of national wealth and international power; it is a better system of industrial life and a finer type of humanity—men and women of clear intellectual insight, high moral courage, unselfish instincts and humane sentiments guiltless of narrow exclusiveness. These men and women, discerning ideally the best methods of building up a nation’s greatness _on the happiness of its people_, will aid our half-civilized races to embody that ideal on the physical plane, and to educate their children to live up to it and show forth all its beauty.