'The same general characteristics are as recognisable in militarist politics within the nation as in the international field. It is not by accident that Prussian and Bismarckian conceptions in foreign policy are invariably accompanied by autocratic conceptions in internal affairs. Both are founded upon a belief in force as the ultimate determinant in human conduct; a disbelief in the things of the mind as factors of social control, a disbelief in moral forces that cannot be expressed in "blood and iron." The impatience shown by the militarist the world over at government by discussion, his desire to "shut up the talking shops" and to govern autocratically, are but expressions of the same temper and attitude. 'The forms which Governments have taken and the general method of social management, are in large part the result of its influence. Most Governments are to-day framed far more as instruments for the exercise of physical force than as instruments of social management. 'The militarist does not allow that man has free will in the matter of his conduct at all; he insists that mechanical forces on the one side or the other alone determine which of two given courses shall be taken; the ideas which either hold, the rôle of intelligent volition, apart from their influence in the manipulation of physical force, play no real part in human society. "Prussianism," Bismarckian "blood and iron," are merely political expressions of this belief in the social field--the belief that force alone can decide things; that it is not man's business to question authority in politics or authority in the form of inevitability in nature. It is not a question of who is right, but of who is stronger. "Fight it out, and right will be on the side of the victor"--on the side, that is, of the heaviest metal or the heaviest muscle, or, perhaps, on that of the one who has the sun at his back, or some other advantage of external nature. The blind material things--not the seeing mind and the soul of man--are the ultimate sanction of human society. 'Such a doctrine, of course, is not only profoundly anti-social, it is anti-human--fatal not merely to better international relations, but, in the end, to the degree to which it influences human conduct at all, to all those large freedoms which man has so painfully won.