I am aware that very often at present they are not thus tested. Dominated as our political thought is by Roman and feudal imagery--hypnotized by symbols and analogies which the necessary development of organized society has rendered obsolete--the ideals even of democracies are still often pure abstractions, divorced from any aim calculated to advance the moral or material betterment of mankind. The craze for sheer size of territory, the mere extent of administrative area, is still deemed a thing deserving immense, incalculable sacrifices. Even these ideals, however, firmly set as they are in our language and tradition, are rapidly yielding to the necessary force of events. A generation ago it would have been inconceivable that a people or a monarch should calmly see part of its country secede and establish itself as a separate political entity without attempting to prevent it by force of arms. Yet this is what happened, a year or two ago, in the Scandinavian peninsula. For forty years Germany has added to her own difficulties and to those of the European situation for the purpose of including Alsace and Lorraine in its Federation, but even there, obeying the tendency which is world-wide, an attempt has been made to create a constitutional and autonomous government. The history of the British Empire for fifty years has been a process of undoing the work of conquest. Colonies are now neither colonies nor possessions; they are independent States. England, which for centuries has made such sacrifices to retain Ireland, is now making great sacrifices in order to make her secession workable. To each political arrangement, to each political ideal, the final test will be applied: does it, or does it not, make for the widest interests of the mass of the people involved? It is true that those who emphasize the psychological causes of war might rejoin with another distinction. They might urge that, though the questions dividing nations had more or less their origin in an economic problem, the economic question becomes itself a moral question, a question of right. It was not the few pence of the tax on tea that the Colonies fought about, but the question of right which its payment involved. So with nations. War, ineffective to achieve an economic end, unprofitable in the sense that the cost involved in the defence of a given economic point exceeds the monetary value of that point, will still be fought because a point, trifling in the economic sense, is all important from the point of view of right; and though there is no real division of interests between nations, though those interests are in reality interdependent, minor differences provoking a sudden and uncontrolled flash of temper suffice to provoke war. War is the outcome of the "hot fits" of men, "of the devil that is in them."