toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the
Military, and the Commercial. It was so in far-back ancient India; it is
so now. Each of these classes endeavours in its turn--as one might
expect--to become the ruling class and to run the government of the
nation. The governments of the nations thus become class-governments.
And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own,
alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it
going.

In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the
mere existence of Class, in itself. In a sense that is a perfectly
natural thing. There _are_ different divisions of human activity, and it
is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to
a certain activity--literary or religious or mercantile or military or
what not--should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as
the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite
organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy _provided
the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation_.
But if the class does _not_ subordinate itself to the general welfare,
if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the
nation for its own uses--if it becomes parasitical, in fact--then it and
the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body
becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body's needs,
become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system.

It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been
festering within. How many times in the history of "civilization" has a
bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a