England's purpose in entering the war has been freely discussed in England. The popular impression is that England declared war upon Germany in order to defend Belgium and to keep her treaty obligations. If we consider conduct in a certain abstraction from the practical setting in which it is performed such a conclusion can be drawn. There was a moral stirring in England, and several writers have commented upon the fact that England subverted her own conscious purposes by her unconscious and instinctive morality. There was a strong feeling against war, even a widespread moral sense that England had become too civilized to wage war. There was a shrinking from the economic hardships that war would entail. Against these strong tendencies there prevailed, at least in popular sentiment, a profound feeling that in some way Germany's civilization was incompatible with England's, and this feeling was in part of the nature of moral aversion. Dillion (55), at least, sees a profound ethical motive in Italy in the late war. After a pro-German party had won out in favor of war, he says, a _deus ex machina_ in the shape of an indignant nation descended upon the scene. But after making allowance for all moral feeling and the unusual and dramatic manner in which moral issues, to a greater degree than ever before in modern history, were brought to the front, we must admit that the political and diplomatic interests and manners of nations have taken their usual course in the war. Nations have been governed by the motives that have always dominated the relations of groups to one another. Germany presents the most glaring example of the contrast between public opinion and expressed motives and political facts. Such expressions as these: that Germany's ideal is one that does violence to no one; that humanity and all human blessings stand under the protection of German arms; that, where the German spirit obtains supremacy, there freedom reigns; that in regard to England's downfall, there can be but one opinion--it is the very highest mission of German culture; that Germany's war is a holy war--such expressions as these, which are psychologically explicable without questioning their sincerity, seem out of harmony, to say the least, with what we know of Germany's political aspirations. Germany's desire for England's downfall does not appear to us to be based upon a moral motive; Germany's war seems far from being a holy war, and it is hard to see in it a means of spreading culture abroad in the world. We cannot give any place in the causes of this war to a moral desire to make the world better. However much Germany may have been convinced that Germany was destined to be a civilizing force in the world, the moral obligation thus aroused, we may be sure, did not become the real motive of the war.