immensely greater than that which goes to Spain, who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the earth!
If Germany is never to duplicate Spain's decadence, it is precisely because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain's temptation to live by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more firmly set than that of Spain herself.
How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever existed—the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.
That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in war; that communities of non-military tradition and instincts, like the Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World; that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike