8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence of Europe, to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that needed unity because 'economics' are sordid, is to refuse to face the needs of human life, and the forces that shape it. Such an attitude, while professing moral elevation, involves a denial of the right of others to live. Its worst defect, perhaps, is that its heroics are fatal to intellectual rectitude, to truth. No society built upon such foundations can stand. CHAPTER III THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT The preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions concerning _The Great Illusion_ than with its positive propositions. What, outlined as briefly as possible, was its central argument? * * * * * That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: Military preponderance, conquest, as a means to man's most elemental needs--bread, sustenance--is futile, because the processes (exchange, division of labour) to which the dense populations of modern Western society are compelled to resort, cannot be exacted by military coercion; they can only operate as the result of a large measure of voluntary acquiescence by the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is indispensable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that hamper human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters.[111] The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and fears, that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation's political security or independence. Political security and economic well-being can only be ensured by international co-operation. This must be economic as well as political, be directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for the purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of some economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether militarily powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and means of subsistence. It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more workable international policy by undermining the main conceptions and prepossessions inimical to an international order.[112] It did not elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point clearly to certain conclusions on that head.