Nor was the war with Spain any exception to this rule. If we absolve the United States from any motive of greed in our claim that the struggle was purely humanitarian in its character, we must still grant that the heavy taxes assessed against her Western colonies by the Spanish government led to the series of revolutions that occasioned our interference. Thus do we find that somewhere in the heart of each war there was the lurking passion for gold. When we make up the mournful lists of the many thousands whose lives have gone out in these contests, we can debit them against the spirit of greed. Milton in Paradise Lost represents that the rebellion in heaven was caused by the like lust, and that Satan's eyes were ever bent in anxious desire toward the very gold of the streets! Milton's imagination concerning heaven stands for the historical fact about earth. The demon of greed is usually the demon of war. The great problems of current national life all trench upon the same influence. If money be not the principal in each of them it comes in as an important confederate. The tariff problem, the currency problem, the canal tolls problem, the trust problem--all these are quickly classified by their names. The cleavage between American political parties for the last fifty years has been made by a wedge of gold. Tariff, or coinage, or trusts--these have been the large words of political speech. In the problems that have a more apparent moral bearing the same commercial element appears. The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. In the Temperance Problem the case is even clearer. Distillers and brewers and saloonists do not enter their trade because they thereby add either to their social standing or to their moral peace. We cannot eliminate from the problem the factor of the human appetite that craves a stimulant; at the same time we know that the motive for the business itself comes from the lure of gold. That gleam invites many men into a path which, as they themselves know well, cannot lead to any large political preferment or to any great personal admirations.