The haunting anxieties which lie behind the failure to find a conclusive answer to that question, probably affect political decisions and deepen hostilities and animosities even where the reason is ill-formulated or unconscious. Some of us, perhaps, fear to face the question lest we be confronted with morally terrifying alternatives. Let posterity decide its own problems. But such fears, and the motives prompted by them, do not disappear by our refusal to face them. Though hidden, they still live, and under various moral disguises influence our conduct. Certainly the fears inspired by the Malthusian theory and the facts upon which it is based, have affected our attitude to war; affected the feeling of very many for whom war is not avowedly, as it is openly and avowedly to some of its students, 'the Struggle for Bread.'[17] _The Great Illusion_ was an attempt frankly to face this ultimate question of the bearing of war upon man's struggle for survival. It took the ground that the victory of one nation over another, however complete, does not solve the problem; it makes it worse in that the conditions and instincts which war accentuates express themselves in nationalist and racial rivalries, create divisions that embarrass and sometimes make impossible the widespread co-operation by which alone man can effectively exploit nature. That demonstration as a whole belongs to the pages that follow. But bearing upon the narrower question of war in relation to the world's good, this much is certain:-- If the object of the combatants in the War was to make sure of their food, then indeed is the result in striking contrast with that intention, for food is assuredly more insecure than ever alike for victor and vanquished. They differ only in the degree of insecurity. The War, the passions which it has nurtured, the political arrangements which those passions have dictated, have given us a Europe immeasurably less able to meet its sustenance problem than it was before. So much less able that millions, who before the War could well support themselves by their own labour, are now unable so to do and have to be fed by drawing upon the slender stocks of their conquerors--stocks very much less than when some at least of those conquerors were in the position of defeated peoples. This is not the effect of the material destruction of war, of the mere battering down of houses and bridges and factories by the soldier.