aim or not? Yet they are, speaking in terms of communities, pure
self-interest--all bound up with economic problems, with money. Does
Admiral Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to
such efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a
mercenary individual? Would he have us believe that the typical great
movements of our times--Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism,
Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation,
Improved Education--bound up as they all are with economic problems--are
not the sort of objects which more and more are absorbing the best
activities of Christendom?

I have attempted to show that the activities which lie outside the range
of these things--the religious wars, movements like those which promoted
the Crusades, or the sort of tradition which we associate with the duel
(which has, in fact, disappeared from Anglo-Saxon society)--do not and
cannot any longer form part of the impulse creating the long-sustained
conflicts between large groups which a European war implies, partly
because such allied moral differences as now exist do not in any way
coincide with the political divisions, but intersect them, and partly
because in the changing character of men's ideals there is a distinct
narrowing of the gulf which is supposed to separate ideal and material
aims. Early ideals, whether in the field of politics or religion, are
generally dissociated from any aim of general well-being. In early
politics ideals are concerned simply with personal allegiance to some
dynastic chief, a feudal lord or a monarch. The well-being of a
community does not enter into the matter at all: it is the personal
allegiance which matters. Later the chief must embody in his person that
well-being, or he does not achieve the allegiance of a community of any
enlightenment; later, the well-being of the community becomes the end in
itself without being embodied in the person of an hereditary chief, so