It is not to be supposed, however, that the small State itself, however it may declaim about 'liberty or death,' has, when the opportunity to assert power presents itself, any greater regard for the rights of nationality--in other people. Take Poland. For a hundred and fifty years Poland has called upon Heaven to witness the monstrous wickedness of denying to a people its right to self-determination; of forcing a people under alien rule. After a hundred and fifty years of the martyrdom of alien rule, Poland acquires its freedom. That freedom is not a year old before Poland itself becomes in temper as imperialistic as any State in Europe. It may be bankrupt, racked with typhus and famine, split by bitter factional quarrels, but the one thing upon which all Poles will unite is in the demand for dominion over some fifteen millions of people, not merely non-Polish, but bitterly anti-Polish. Although Poland is perhaps the worst case, all the new small States show a similar disposition: Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Finland, Greece, have all now their own imperialism, limited only, apparently, by the extent of their power. All these people have fought for the right to national independence; there is not one that is not denying the right to national independence. If every Britain has its Ireland, every Ireland has its Ulster. But is this belief in Nationality at all? What should we have thought of a Southerner of the old Slave States fulminating against the crime of slavery? Should we have thought his position any more logical if he had explained that he was opposed to slavery because he did not want to become a slave? The test of his sincerity would have been, not the conduct he exacted of others, but the conduct he proposed to follow towards others. 'One is a Nationalist,' says Professor Corradini, one of the prophets of Italian _sacro egoismo_, 'while waiting to be able to become an Imperialist.' He prophesies that in twenty years 'all Italy will be Imperialist.'[61] * * * * * The last thing intended here is any excuse of German violence by a futile _tu quoque_. But what it is important to know, if we are to understand the real motives of our conduct--and unless we do, we cannot really know where our conduct is leading us, where we are going--is whether we really cared about the 'moral aims of war,' the things for which we thought we were willing to die. Were we not as a matter of fact fighting--and dying--for something else?