i88 Declining Effectiveness of Force 



procure for them, men are led to wish to inculcate 

 these ideas into their fellow-men by persuasion, 

 or, if this means does not succeed, by force. From 

 this motive arises a series of wars in which the 

 objective is purely of the mental order. In the 

 wars of religion, for example, the object was not 

 to confiscate territory or to seize wealth, but 

 simply to change certain ideas. Thus Philip II. 

 of Spain waged the devastating wars against 

 Holland because he wished to force the Dutch 

 to remain Catholic. The Dutch people resisted 

 because they did not wish to remain Catholic. 

 The Spanish were not seeking, then, to seize the 

 wealth of Holland. If they desired to take pos- 

 session of the Dutch Government, it was not for 

 the sake of the profit which it would have given 

 them, but in order to have the power to stamp 

 out heresy. 



We see, then, how the wars between human 

 associations change their object insensibly as 

 they pass from the lowest phase of the war for 

 food, to the highest phase, in which they become 

 exceedingly complicated, of a struggle to make 

 other men adopt our mental possessions. The 

 successive phases of the struggle between human 

 associations may be summarized as follows: 



1. The physiological struggle ; 



2. The economic struggle ; 



3. The political struggle; 



4. The intellectual struggle. 



The order in which the different forms of struggle 



