Taking our world as we find it, and viewing the nature of nations in the light of their history and of their persistent antagonisms, one might readily believe that the causes of war and war itself will continue into a far future. No war, the pessimist might well argue, will destroy national vitality or neutralize the many points of strain. There may be great coalitions and even Leagues of Nations, but these may only make wars more terrible when they come. The friendship of nations will still be insecure and shifting. The great strategic points of the world will remain. Small countries will continue to be ambitious and jealous of one another. Island countries will still be faced by coasts that contain possibilities of danger. The Constantinoples and the Gibraltars will remain; Suez and Panama will be left, and Verdun will still be something more than a historic memory (99).
That these objectives might all be brought into a permanent state of equilibrium, by some ideal world politics, that nations _ought_ to abandon their ideas of empire or at least see how crude these ideas are, how out of relation to our modern ideas of value, and how out of place in a practical world--all this we can readily understand, but who will expect nations to become very different from what they are now, and who shall say how many imperial eggs there are in the world yet to be hatched? There are many ways of justifying these ambitions--Germany justifies hers by reason, and the researches of her great historians--the Treitschkes and the Mommsens; Russia bases her claims upon her religion and her ethos; Japan brings her divinity and her traditions, her vitality and her intelligence; England offers her justice and above all her proved genius for government as a justification of empire. But after all, these desires for empire lie deeper than proof and reason can go. Poetic, dramatic and religious elements enter into them. There are geniuses among nations. The creative force in a nation is its life force, its essence and its reality. In some sense the desire to be an empire is the whole meaning of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare--or is but a term in the logic by which nations rise to other and higher forms; or finally is a crime or a mistake which it is within the power of the will of man to abandon or amend--these are problems of the philosophy of history.