continue to use it the one against the other, exploiting by its means
the populations they rule, and become not the organisers of social
co-operation among the Balkan populations, but merely, like the Turks,
their conquerors and "owners," then they in their turn will share the
fate of the Turk.

(6) The fundamental causes of this war are economic in the narrower, as
well as in the larger sense of the term; in the first because conquest
was the Turk's only trade--he desired to live out of taxes wrung from a
conquered people, to exploit them as a means of livelihood, and this
conception was at the bottom of most of Turkish misgovernment. And in
the larger sense its cause is economic because in the Balkans, remote
geographically from the main drift of European economic development,
there has not grown up that interdependent social life, the innumerable
contacts which in the rest of Europe have done so much to attenuate
primitive religious and racial hatreds.

(7) A better understanding by the Turk of the real nature of civilised
government, of the economic futility of conquest of the fact that a
means of livelihood (an economic system), based upon having more force
than someone else and using it ruthlessly against him, is an impossible
form of human relationship bound to break down, _would_ have kept the
peace.

(8) If European statecraft had not been animated by false conceptions,
largely economic in origin, based upon a belief in the necessary rivalry
of states, the advantages of preponderant force and conquest, the
Western nations could have composed their quarrels and ended the
abominations of the Balkan peninsula long ago--even in the opinion of
the _Times_. And it is our own false statecraft--that of Great