This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself “encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor, or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority. [Sidenote: World problem is due to competition for unorganized territory.] Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem or organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were impossible. The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and complicated. The point I have been making will, I fear, seem a paradox to many readers,—that the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; that the modern nations have lived in an armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great that the competition for them is to the knife.