At that time, when Britain was composed of several separate States, that struggled thus with one another for land and food, it supported with great difficulty anything between one and two million inhabitants, just as the vast spaces now occupied by the United States supported about a hundred thousand, often subject to famine, frequently suffering great shortage of food, able to secure just the barest existence of the simplest kind. Today, although Britain supports anything from twenty to forty times, and North America something like a thousand times, as large a population in much greater comfort, with no period of famine, with the whole population living much more largely and deriving much more from the soil than did the men of the Heptarchy, or the Red Indians, the "struggle for bread" does not now take the form of struggle between groups of the population. The more they fought, the less efficiently did they support themselves; the less they fought one another, the more efficiently did they all support themselves. This simple illustration is at least proof of this, that the struggle for material things did not involve any necessary struggle between the separate groups or States; for those material things are given in infinitely greater abundance when the States cease to struggle. Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those conflicts, that origin was not any inevitable conflict in the exploitation of the earth. If those conflicts were concerned with material things at all, they arose from a mistake about the best means of obtaining them, exploiting the earth, and ceased when those concerned realized the mistake. Just as Britain supported its population better when Englishmen gave up fighting between themselves, so the world as a whole could support its population better if it gave up fighting. Moreover, we have passed out of the stage when we could massacre a conquered population to make room for us. When we conquer an inferior people like the Filipinos, we don't exterminate them, we give them an added chance of life. The weakest don't go to the wall. But at this point parenthetically I want to enter a warning. You may say, if this notion of the rivalry of nations is false, how do you account for the fact of its playing so large a part in the present war? Well, that is easily explained--men are not guided necessarily by their interest even in their soberest moments, but by what they believe to be their interest. Men do not judge from the facts, but from what they believe to be the facts. War is the "failure of human understanding." The religious wars were due to the belief that two religions could not exist side by side. It was not true, but the false belief provoked the wars. Our notions as to the relation of political power to a nation's prosperity are just as false, and this fallacy, like the older one, plays its part in the causation of war.