historical events have been due to the twists and turns given to the
economic instinct by forces that were not economic. For instance, this
theory traces the French war of Edward III to a quarrel about the French
wines. Any one who has even smelt the Middle Ages must feel fifty answers
spring to his lips; but in this cause one will suffice. There would have
been no such war, then, if we all drank water like cows. But when one is
a man one enters the world of historic choice. The act of drinking wine
is one that requires explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.

But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.

When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago, an
ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said that
they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was eagerly
taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do not see why
it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable uprisings in
history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is generally
rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and
mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The
English strikers used some barren republican formula (and as the
definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about
being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by
them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry
scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of making bricks with
nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic intellectual excuses they
may have put forward for their strange and unnatural conduct in walking
out when the prison door was open, there can be no doubt that the real
cause was the warm weather. Such a climate notoriously also produces
delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr. Kipling describes. And it
was while their brains were disordered by the heat that the Jews fancied