Will some prophet please tell us how poor we must be in order to be virtuous and pacific, and how virtuous and pacific the world was before it became prosperous? Were there no wars before the Twentieth Century? The extent of this war is scarcely a result of the world's opulence, when Sir Edward, now Viscount, Grey, offered to keep England out of it if Germany would limit the war to the Balkans or to Russia. The war has involved most of the world because Germany began it by attacking France and Belgium, and followed that up by attacking Americans on the high seas, where they had as much right to be as at home.
This argument that the war is the result of wealth is immoral, because it makes the guilt of America and England even greater than that of Germany (for they are richer); and because it is the argument of the communist--that theft is not wrong, because it is the inevitable consequence of private property: if no one has any right to anything, then no one will steal anything.
Nothing holds the attention of the prophet better than the idea that the war is the result of commercial competition. This also is an invention of the devil to exculpate Germany. All of us are in business for gain; we are actuated by greed; we are making cotton cloth to cover Africans for the profit that we can get out of it; we ought to think only of clothing the naked, and if we would only give the cotton cloth to the Hottentots without material return, we should have the proud satisfaction of seeing them draped in chintzes, and we should be safe from that wealth which is so certain to make us wicked. On those terms there would be very little competition in supplying the Hottentots, and no danger whatever that any nation would fight us to gain that portion of the export trade.
But the "peaceful penetration" of all other countries by German industry and commerce had been going on for thirty years before the war. England had stamped "Made in Germany" upon the imports from that country under the delusion that people would not buy them if they knew they were not made by domestic industry, but the only result was to advertise German business. Shipping interests at Antwerp, factories in France, hotels in Switzerland, iron works in Italy, commercial establishments in China and South America, the trade and transportation of Turkey, passed into German hands, and no nation offered armed resistance. No less a witness than Prince von Buelow testifies that England could easily have stopped German naval expansion, but did not do so. German commercial expansion did not cause the war, unless Great Britain, the principal sufferer from German business success, attacked Germany in 1914. And this is the German official explanation of the war supplied for domestic consumption. And yet it is repudiated by the highest witness who could be put upon the stand. No less a person than Prince Lichnowsky, who was German Ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war, traces the war to Austrian projects in the Balkans, with the "blank check" of Germany, together with irritation in Russia caused by Germany's own efforts to establish a dominating influence in Constantinople. This leaves nothing of the story invented for the German people, and propagated by the university professors, that England attacked Germany because the latter was getting its trade away from it. And this falsehood, invented to shield the guilty nation, has a special fascination for the prophets. It looks so much like taking a broad and general and impartial view of the world. Satan is very liberal; it pains him to have guilt attached to any individual. It is more in accord with his philosophic and humane ideas to regard crime as a product of social conditions, and war as the result of trade competition.