And science and knowledge, made the instrument of selfishness and competition, have armed man against man, class against class, and nation against nation, with tenfold the power of destruction which belonged to a less educated and highly organised age." [Footnote 1: _The War and the Church_, by Charles Gore (Oxford, Mowbray, 1914).] The civilised world has been shocked during the past months at the spectacle of the open adoption by a great Power of this philosophy of selfishness.

Men had not realised that the methods and principles underlying so much of our commercial and industrial life could be transferred so completely to the field of politics or so ruthlessly pressed home by military force.

But it is well for us to remember that it is not Prussia, even in the modern world, who invented the theory of Blood and Iron or the philosophy of Force.

The Iron Law of Wages is a generation older than Bismarck: and "Business is Business" can be no less odious a watchword than "War is War." Treitschke and Nietzsche may have furnished Prussian ambitions with congenial ammunition; but Bentham with his purely selfish interpretation of human nature and Marx with his doctrine of the class-struggle--the high priest of Individualism and the high priest of Socialism--cannot be acquitted of a similar charge.

If the appeal has been made in a less crude and brutal form, and if the instrument of domination has been commercial and industrial rather than military, it is because Militarism is not the besetting sin of the English-speaking peoples.