'But no righteous conscience, it may be said, could give its verdict against a solemn pledge taken and reciprocated; no righteous conscience could, in a society of nations, declare against the ends of that society. Indeed I think it could, and sometimes would, if its sense of justice were outraged, if its duty to those who were bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh came into conflict with its duty to those who were not directly belonging to it.... 'The mechanism of a State exists mainly for its own preservation, and cannot be turned against this, its legitimate end. The conscience of a State will not traverse this main condition, and to weaken its conscience is to weaken its life.... 'The strong will not give way to the weak; the one who thinks himself in the right will not yield to those whom he believes to be in the wrong; the living generations will not be restrained by the promises to a dead one; nature will not be controlled by conventions.'[106] It is the last note that gives the key to popular feeling about the scramble for territory. In _The Great Illusion_ whole pages of popular writing are quoted to show that the conception of the struggle as in truth the struggle for survival had firmly planted itself in the popular consciousness. One of the critics who is so severe upon the present writer for trying to undermine the economic foundation of that popular creed, Benjamin Kidd, himself testifies to the depth and sweep of this pseudo-Darwinism (he seems to think indeed that it is true Darwinism, which it is not, as Darwin himself pointed out). He declares that 'there is no precedent in the history of the human mind to compare with the saturnalia of the Western intellect' which followed the popularisation of what he regards as Darwin's case and I would regard as a distortion of it. Kidd says it 'touched the profoundest depth of the psychology of the West.' 'Everywhere throughout civilisation an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of the law of biological necessity in books of statecraft and war-craft, of expanding military empires.' 'Struggle for life,' 'a biological necessity,' 'survival of the fit,' had passed into popular use and had come to buttress popular feeling about the inevitability of war and its ultimate justification and the uselessness of organising the natives save on a basis of conflict. We are now in a position to see the respective moral positions of the two protagonists.