The evil is not only in its resultant inhumanities. It lies much more in the fact that this development of moral blinkers deprives us of the capacity to see where we are going, and what we are crushing underfoot; and that may well end by our walking over the precipice. During the War, we formed judgments of the German character which literally make it sub-human. For our praise of the French (during the same period) language failed us. Yet less than twenty years ago the rôles were reversed.[94] The French were the mad dogs, and the Germans of our community of blood. The refusal to face the plain facts of life, a refusal made on grounds which we persuade ourselves are extremely noble, but which in fact result too often in simple falsehood and distortion, is revealed by the common pre-war attitude to the economic situation dealt with in this book. The present writer took the ground before the War that much of the dense population of modern Europe could not support itself save by virtue of an economic internationalism which political ideas (ideas which war would intensify) were tending to make impossible. Now it is obvious that before there can be a spiritual life, there must be a fairly adequate physical one. If life is a savage and greedy scramble over the means of sheer physical sustenance, there cannot be much in it that is noble and inspiring. The point of the argument was, as already mentioned, not that the economic pre-occupation _should_ occupy the whole of life, but that it _will_ if it is simply disregarded; the way to reduce the economic pre-occupation is to solve the economic problem. Yet these plain and undeniable truths were somehow twisted into the proposition that men went to war because they believed it 'paid,' in the stockbroking sense, and that if they saw it did not 'pay' they would not go to war. The task of attempting to find the conditions in which it will be possible for men to live at all with decent regard for their fellows, without drifting into cannibalistic struggles for sustenance one against another, is made to appear something sordid, a 'usurer's gospel.' And on that ground, very largely, the 'economics' of international policy were neglected. We are still facing the facts. Self deception has become habitual.