Empire if such a demonstration is ever to be possible. Every condition for a crucial experiment was present: a brilliant inauguration in the very atmosphere of military triumph, a conscious realization of the value of the martial spirit, a determination to keep the warrior ideal conspicuously foremost with a people singularly able and willing to accept it. If this is the way in which an ultimate world-power is to be founded and maintained, no single necessary factor is lacking. And yet after a few years, in what should be the very first youth of an Empire, we find it engaged against a combination of Powers of fabulous strength, which, by a miracle of diplomacy no one else could have accomplished, it has united against itself. It is an irrelevance to assert that this combination is the result of malice, envy, treachery, barbarism; such terms are by hypothesis not admissible. If the system of Empire-building is not proof against those very elementary enemies, any further examination of it is of course purely academic. To withstand those is just what the Empire is there for; if it falls a victim to them, it fails in its first and simplest function and displays a radical defect in its structure. To the objectivist practice is the only test in human affairs, and he will not allow his attention to be distracted from what did happen by the most perfectly logical demonstration of what ought to have happened. It is the business of an Empire not to encounter overwhelming enemies. Declaring itself to be the most perfect example of its kind and the foreordained heir of the world will remain no more than a pleasant—and dangerous—indulgence, and will not prevent it showing by its fate that the fruits of perfection and the promise of permanence are not demonstrated in the wholesale {132} manufacture of enemies and in the combination of them into an alliance of unparalleled strength. * * * * * The doctrine of the biological necessity of war may, then, be regarded as open to strong suspicion on theoretical grounds of being contrary to the evolutionary tendency already plainly marked out for the human species. The fact that the nation in which its truth was most generally accepted has been led—and undoubtedly to some extent by it—into a war which can scarcely fail to prove disastrous suggests that in the practical field it is equally fallacious. It may well, therefore, be removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other pseudo-scientific dogmas of political “biologists”—the facile doctrines of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on Teutons and Celts, on Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races, and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have gulled the innocent so long. IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.