]
It is not, however, any part of my contention that nature should push her
love of competition so far as necessarily to involve us in war with Great
Britain, at least at present, for nature has various and most unlooked-for
ways of arriving at her ends, since men never can determine, certainly in
advance, what avenue will, to them, prove the least resistant. They very
often make an error, as did the Germans, which they can only correct by
enduring disaster, defeat, and infinite suffering. Nature might very well,
for example, prefer that consolidation should advance yet another step
before a reaction toward chaos should begin.
This last war has, apparently, been won by a fusion of two economic
systems which together hold and administer a preponderating mass of fluid
capital, and which have partially pooled their resources to prevail. They
appear almost as would a gigantic lizard which, having been severed in an
ancient conflict, was now making a violent but only half-conscious effort
to cause the head and body to unite with the tail, so that the two might
function once more as a single organism, governed by a single will. Under
our present form of capitalistic life there would seem to be no reason why
this fluid capital should not fuse and by its energy furnish the motor
which should govern the world.
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