[6] There is, indeed, another school which would like to shut off all foreign countries by a tariff wall and make the British Empire mutually self-supporting, on the economic basis adopted by those three old ladies in decayed circumstances who subsisted by taking tea in one another's houses. [7] Even if partially successful, as has lately been pointed out, the greater the financial depression of Germany the greater would be the advantage to Russia of doing business with Germany. [8] It may be proper to point out that I by no means wish to imply that democracy is necessarily the ultimate and most desirable form of political society, but merely that it is a necessary stage for those peoples that have not yet reached it. Even Treitschke in his famous _History_, while idealising the Prussian State, always assumes that movement towards democracy is beneficial progress. For the larger question of the comparative merits of the different forms of political society, see an admirable little book by C. Delisle Burns, _Political Ideals_ (1915). And see also the searching study, _Political Parties_ (English translation, 1915), by Robert Michels, who, while accepting democracy as the highest political form, argues that practically it always works out as oligarchy. [9] Professor D.S. Jordan has quoted the letter of a German officer to a friend in Roumania (published in the Bucharest _Adverul_, 21 Aug., 1915): "How difficult it was to convince our Emperor that the moment had arrived for letting loose the war, otherwise Pacifism, Internationalism, Anti-Militarism, and so many other noxious weeds would have infected our stupid people. That would have been the end of our dazzling nobility. We have everything to gain by the war, and all the chimeras and stupidities of democracy will be chased from the world for an infinite time." [10] "Let us be patient," a Japanese is reported to have said lately, "until Europe has completed her _hara-kiri_." VIII FEMINISM AND MASCULINISM During more than a century we have seen the slow but steady growth of the great Women's movement, of the movement of Feminism in the wide sense of that term. The conquests of this movement have sometimes been described by rhetorical feminists as triumphs over "Man." That is scarcely true. The champions of Feminism have nearly as often been men as women, and the forces of Anti-feminism have been the vague massive inert forces of an order which had indeed made the world in an undue degree "a man's world," but unconsciously and involuntarily, and by an instrumentation which was feminine as well as masculine. The advocates of Woman's Rights have seldom been met by the charge that they were unjustly encroaching on the Rights of Man. Feminism has never encountered an aggressive and self-conscious Masculinism.