The first of these needs only brief mention. No people in this enlightened age wishes to fight as a matter of course, regardless of any reasonable pretext. If nations never had any personal interests involved, there would, of course, be no more war. In this respect the people of the United States are not ahead of the other parts of the civilized world. Disinterested parties have been in favor of peace for two thousand years. The other two facts deserve more extended consideration. The disposition in individuals to pluck motes out of their neighbors' eyes and leave beams in their own, in the nation becomes what Herbert Spencer calls the bias of patriotism. According to him patriotism is but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view international affairs apart from national interests, we are handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers' Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with Japan, England's course in South Africa, and America's attitude toward the Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic pride.