xxii INTRODUCTION 



Bill of 1897. It was published actually on February 

 ist, 1896, and whatever fame it may have had in 

 Germany, it passed completely unnoticed by the 

 Press in this country. England was absorbed, so far 

 as foreign politics went, by the fear of France and of 

 Russia, and was entirely friendly to Germany. Being 

 without status as a political writer, and extremely 

 anxious to do anything I could to turn opinion away 

 from hostility to Russia and France, I took the mode 

 of expression open to me and gave the article the 

 form of a scientific essay. I asserted that a very large 

 number of the wars of the past had been " mere ex- 

 pressions of the individual ambitions of rulers, or the 

 jog-trot opportunism of diplomatists," but that a 

 period was rapidly approaching when the pressure 

 of expanding nations would lead to wars that 

 " could not end in peace with honour, whose spectre 

 could not be laid by the pale ghost of arbitration." 

 I suggested that the prediction of the wars of the 

 future, of these struggles between expanding nations, 

 was a biological problem, and that on biological 

 grounds it was plain that the conflict would be most 

 certain and most deadly between species that were 

 most similar. I went on to say : 



" France, despite our historic antagonism for her, 

 is no rival of England in the biological sense. She is 

 not a nation that is growing and striving to expand 

 beyond her boundaries. Her wars have been the 

 dreams of rulers, not the movements of peoples. Her 

 colonies have not struck roots of their own, but have 

 remained in organic connection with the mother- 

 country, draining their vital sap from her, In com- 

 merce, in art, in letters, in the daily business of 



