near to us, because it is in our blood. The whole private life of the
commercial and capitalist classes (who stand as the representatives of
the nations to-day) is founded on the same principle. As individuals our
one object is to find some worker or group of workers whose labour value
we can appropriate. Look at the endless columns of stock and share
quotations in the daily papers, and consider the armies of those who
scan these lists over their breakfast-tables with the one view of
finding some-where an industrial concern whose slave-driven toilers
will yield the shareholder 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 per cent, on his capital.
Undisguised and shameless parasitism is the order, or disorder, of our
days. The rapacity of beasts of prey is in our social life but thinly
veiled--thinly veiled indeed by a wash of "Christian" sentiment and by a
network of philanthropic institutions for the supposed benefit of the
very victims whom we have robbed.

Is it any wonder that this principle of internecine warfare and rapacity
which rules in our midst, this vulgar greed, which loads people's bodies
with jewels and furs and their tables with costly food, regardless of
those from whom these comforts are snatched, should eventuate ultimately
in rapacity and violence on the vast stage of the drama of nations, and
in red letters of war and conflict written across the continents? It is
no good, with a pious snuffle, to say we are out to put down warfare and
militarism, and all the time to encourage in our own lives, and in our
Church and Empire Leagues and other institutions, the most sordid and
selfish commercialism--which itself is in essence a warfare, only a
warfare of a far meaner and more cowardly kind than that which is
signalized by the shock of troops or the rage of rifles and cannon.

No, there is no other way; and only by the general abandonment of our
present commercial and capitalist system will the plague of war be