156 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



the West the economic system, untouched by the 

 slightest breath of collective idealism, against which 

 Marx declared the social war or against which 

 a President of the United States formulated the 

 terrible indictment that it is only a struggle for 

 interests, of which the law is, " Let everyone look 

 out for himself : let every generation look out 

 for itself : while we reared giant machinery which 

 made it impossible for any but those who stood at 

 the levers of control to have a chance to look out 

 for themselves " ? l Above all, why in the single 

 instance in which the West has hitherto grasped 

 the conception of employing the emotion of the 

 ideal on a large scale towards a collective aim, 

 namely, in organizing nations for war, has it hitherto 

 only directed it to results so atavistic and so de- 

 vastating that for a thousand years Western civiliza- 

 tion has rendered universal history synonymous 

 with universal homicide ? 



Now if we regard the history of the West in the 

 past, the first fact which stands out before the 

 imagination is the overwhelming and dominating 

 influence of the heredity of the fight in all Western 

 peoples. The peoples of the West represent, it 

 has been already said, the largest, the most intense, 



1 " Inaugural Address of President Dr. Woodrow Wilson, 

 1913," Times, $ March 1913. 



