It is the fact that in our new and favourable coalfields, such as the South Yorkshire area, the men working under the most favourable modern conditions and in new mines where the face is near the shaft, do not obtain as much coal per man employed, as that got by the miners in the country generally under the conditions appertaining forty and fifty years ago. [15] Mr J. M. Keynes, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace,' p. 211, says:--'It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.' [16] Incidentally we see nations not yet brought under capitalist organisation (e.g. the peasant nations of the Balkans) equally subject to the hostilities we are discussing. Bertrand Russell writes (_New Republic_, September 15th., 1920):--'No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal to do with causing the war, but rivalry is a different thing from profit-seeking. Probably by combination, English and German capitalists could have made more than they did out of rivalry, but the rivalry was instinctive, and its economic form was accidental. The capitalists were in the grip of nationalist instinct as much as their proletarian 'dupes.' In both classes some have gained by the war, but the universal will to war was not produced by the hope of gain. It was produced by a different set of instincts, one which Marxian psychology fails to recognise adequately.... Men desire power, they desire satisfaction for their pride and their self-respect. They desire victory over their rivals so profoundly that they will invent a rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a victory possible. All these motives cut across the pure economic motive in ways that are practically important. There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of psycho-analysis. In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to rationalise their conduct. If a man thinks that the only reasonable motive in politics is economic self-advancement, he will persuade himself that the things he wishes to do will make him rich. When he wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is ruining his trade. If, on the other hand, he is an 'idealist,' who holds that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human race, he will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand their humiliation. The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage, but not through the former.