This is not an attempt to answer one set of critics by quoting another set. The self-same people take those two attitudes. I have quoted above a passage of Admiral Mahan's in which he declares that nations can never be expected to act from any other motive than that of interest (a generalisation, by the way, from which I should most emphatically dissent). He goes on to declare that Governments 'must put first the rival interests of their own wards ... their own people,' and are thus pushed to the acquisition of markets by means of military predominance. Very well. _The Great Illusion_ argued some of Admiral Mahan's propositions in terms of interest and advantage. And then, when he desired to demolish that argument, he did not hesitate in a long article in the _North American Review_ to write as follows:-- 'The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those maintaining them, is not primarily an economical advantage, in the sense of depriving a neighbour State of its own, or fear of such consequences to itself through the deliberate aggression of a rival having that particular end in view.... The fundamental proposition of the book is a mistake. Nations are under no illusion as to the unprofitableness of war in itself.... The entire conception of the work is itself an illusion, based upon a profound misreading of human action. To regard the world as governed by self-interest only is to live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world possessed by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to do it bare justice, persistently entertains.'[107]