The organisation of pre-war Germany was, then, very similar to that of an army and was efficient in a similar way, that is to say for the attainment of particular immediate ends. In a wider view, such national organisation is of a lower nature than that of England or France or America; for the ends or purposes of a nation are remote, they transcend the vision of the present and cannot be defined in terms of material prosperity or military power; and only the development of the national mind, as a natural and spontaneous growth, can give a prospect of continued progress towards those indefinable ends. Germany was organised from above for the attainment of a particular end, namely material prosperity and power among the peoples of the world; and, as the bulk of her population had been led to accept this narrow national purpose, the organisation of the nation, like that of an army, was extremely effective for the purpose. It gave her a great advantage as against the other nations, among whom the lack of any such clear cut purpose in the minds of all was a principal difficulty in the way of effective national thought and action. For a like reason the existence of a nation organised in this way is a constant threat to the nations of higher type; and, as we have seen, it may compel them at any time to revert to or adopt, temporarily at least and so far as they are able, an organisation of the lower and more immediately effective kind. And this threat was the justification of the nations of the Entente, when they demanded a radical change in this political organisation of Germany. In a similar way, in the past, the Huns, the Turks, and the Arabs, peoples organised primarily for war and conquest, had to be destroyed as nations if the evolution of nations of higher type was to go forward. CHAPTER XI THE WILL OF THE NATION[84] Rousseau, in his famous treatise, _Le Contrat Social_, wrote “There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a sum of individual wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.” That is to say, a certain number of men will the general good, while most men will only their private good; the latter neutralise one another, while the former co-operate to form an effective force.