Without the prospects of loot there would be no war. When ambition and glory lure a nation on, the desire for loot supplies the motor force. When hunger forces a people to invade a nation, loot becomes a necessity.
What the wealthy of every nation refuse to understand, or even to consider, is that material force engenders vanity, individualism, rivalry and envy. All manifestations of force contain an element of disintegration. The type of a nation will always represent the policy and the trend of the nation.
The supreme blunder of the Peace Conference was made when the delegates, with Mr. Wilson at their head, refused to face the fact that no nation can rise above the ideals and idiosyncrasies of the national temperament, and that sudden liberation from restraint is as dangerous for a country as it is for an individual.
There is but one step between liberty and licence, and that step meant pandemonium for all classes in Russia. For other peoples it may mean political bondage and the total loss of a national spirit. For the Hindoos it will mean civil wars between the different native rulers, for China it has meant a series of revolutions and counter revolutions which may have to be suppressed by the drastic hand of a Japanese Bonaparte.
The League Conference at Versailles took no account of the working of natural law. Sentimentality was the key-note of Mr. Wilson’s idealism, and commercial expansion the dominant idea of his opponents.
As for religion exerting any fundamental influence for peace and right thinking, it caused Protestants to fight Protestants and Catholics to fight Catholics, while German and Austrian cardinals did all in their power to aid in the invasion and conquest of Belgium and France, on one hand, and Italy, the stronghold of the Papal See, on the other; and all this in the face of the statement of the Kaiser that Catholicism must be destroyed. Nothing like it has been known since the dawn of Christianity.
The only apparent reason for the quiescent attitude of some of the smaller nations is that they are without the material means of waging war on their neighbors.
Just as long as politicians are impelled by self-interest there will be found nations that will have to use force for the suppression of licence and the curtailment of liberty. In every country the people are getting what their thoughts and deeds create for them.