Four Successive Forms of Struggle 183 



perialist have learned the doctrine of Admiral Mahan, 

 that the greatness and prosperity of a country depends 

 mainly on sea-power. Both believe that efficiency 

 and success in war is one of the main conditions of 

 national prosperity. 



Now as long as the two nations do not rise to a 

 saner political ideal, as long as both English and Ger- 

 man people are agreed in accepting the current politi- 

 cal philosophy, as long as both nations shall consider 

 military power not merely as a necessary and tempo- 

 rary evil to submit to, but as a permanent and noble 

 ideal to strive after, the German argument remains 

 unanswerable. War is indeed predestined, and no 

 diplomatists sitting around a great table in the 

 Wilhelmstrasse or the Ballplatz or the Quai d'Orsay 

 will be able to ward off the inevitable. It is only, 

 therefore, in so far as both nations will move away 

 from the old political philosophy, that an understand- 

 ing between Germany and England will become possi- 

 ble. . . . We must repeat for the last time the 

 Leitmotiv of this book: If, as the result of some 

 internal difficulty or external contingency, those 

 military and Imperialist motives be allowed to gather 

 strength, then indeed the political pessimist is right — 

 war is inevitable. ... It is the ideas and ideals 

 that must be fundamentally changed: " Instauratio 

 facienda ah imis fundamentis." And those ideals once 

 changed, all motives for a war between England and 

 Germany would vanish as by magic. But alas! ideas 

 or ideals do not change by magic or prestige — they 

 can only change by the slow operation of intellectual 

 conversion. Arguments alone can do it. ^ 



'Sarolea, The Anglo-German Problem, 1912, pp. 362-65. 



