Admiral Mahan was a writer of very great and deserved reputation, in the very first rank of those dealing with the relations of power to national politics, certainly incapable of any conscious dishonesty of opinion. Yet, as we have seen, his opinion on the most important fact of all about war--its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify it or provoke it--swings violently in absolute self-contradiction. And the flat contradiction here revealed shows--and this surely is the moral of such an incident--that he could never have put to himself detachedly, coldly, impartially the question: 'What do I really believe about the motives of nations in War? To what do the facts as a whole really point?' Had he done so, it might have been revealed to him that what really determined his opinion about the causes of war was a desire to justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he had devoted his life and given years of earnest labour and study; to defend from some imputation of futility one of the most ancient of man's activities that calls for some at least of the sublimest of human qualities. If a widened idealism clearly discredited that ancient institution, he was prepared to show that an ineradicable conflict of national interests rendered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was irrelevant to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting the interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the motives pushing to war were not those of interest at all. It may be said that none the less the thesis under discussion substitutes one selfish argument for another; tries by appealing to self-interest (the self-interest of a group or nation) to turn selfishness from a destructive result to a more social result. Its basis is self. Even that is not really true. For, first, that argument ignores the question of trusteeship; and, secondly, it involves a confusion between the motive of a given policy and the criterion by which its goodness or badness shall be tested. How is one to deal with the claim of the 'mystic nationalist' (he exists abundantly even outside the Balkans) that the subjugation of some neighbouring nationalism is demanded by honour; that only the great State can be the really good State; that power--'majesty,' as the Oriental would say--is a thing good in itself?[108] There are ultimate questions as to what is good and what is bad that no argument can answer; ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can reduce those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to certain social needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be a good State; but a State which cannot feed its population cannot be a good State, for in that case the citizens will be hungry, greedy, and violent.