But this is not the whole story; the “inside of the cup” still requires examination. What if the War itself sprang from causes that were already undermining man’s confidence in man? What if the silliness of our views of man in 1918 were merely a pustule through which a systemic social disease poured itself? Certainly the current “There you see what human nature really is” is less a discovery than a confirmation of an antecedent opinion; it is an “I told you so.” It is patent to all who think about such matters that the Great War was no meteorite, dropping upon us from outside our system of everyday life, but a direct and entirely to-be-expected growth within this system. Society did not suddenly change its habits, or suddenly get sick. Conflict was already here under other names--the language was industrial, commercial, economic, but the hand was the hand of Jacob. We shall have occasion, a little later in our inquiry, to ask somewhat in detail what motives industrialism has been bringing to the fore, and what part, accordingly, industrialism has had in bringing about the present sense of disillusionment. Certainly the roots of the modern war-system derive their chief sustenance from economic desires; and just as certainly we were judging men before the War by these desires and by the conduct that they produced. This mind-set, already present when hostilities started, helps explain several items in the psychic history of the War. Take, for example, the grotesque psychic compound, patriotism plus profiteering. How was it possible, it has been said, for citizens to profess intense patriotism and utter devotion to winning the War at the very moment when they extorted high payment for their support of it? Did they want the War merely for the sake of the profits it brought them? No, for they gave their sons with alacrity. The human-nature puzzle that we have to work out is that of a sincere patriotism that could be at the same time (as far as the profiteer’s consciousness is concerned) an eager, self-regarding, profit-making business enterprise. The solution of the puzzle, apart from the general principle of mixed motives, is to be found in the habitual meaning that life already had acquired. Of course one must make profits from every move; why not? The irony of the situation--unperturbed and sincere devotion to a way of life that produces wars that sacrifice one’s own offspring in battle--is obvious to anyone who stands outside industrialism as an observer and critic of it. To some extent, the people have begun to see it; the emotional color of the term “war profiteer” is evidence; but we shall not appreciate the whole truth until we realize that in and through the accepted ways of industrialism a degraded view of “what we are here for” had come to be taken for granted.