The whole situation might be summed up by saying that the commercial development of the world will not wait until each territory has created for itself a stable and fairly modern political system. By some means or other the weak states have to be brought within the framework of commercial administration. Their independence and integrity, so-called, are dependent upon their creating conditions under which world-wide business can be conducted. The pressure to organize the globe is enormous.... Out of this complexity of motive there is created a union of various groups on the imperial program: the diplomatic group is interested primarily in prestige; the military group in an opportunity to act; the bureaucratic in the creation of new positions; the financial groups in safeguarding investments; traders in securing protection and privileges, religious groups in civilizing the heathen, the “intellectuals,” in realizing theories of expansion and carrying out “manifest destinies,” the people generally in adventure and glory and the sense of being great. These interested groups severally control public opinion, and under modern methods of publicity public opinion is easily “educated.” Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion to inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia.... [Sidenote: War is for sake of prestige in undeveloped countries.]