APPENDIX ON RECENT EVENTS IN EUROPE

I have attempted elsewhere to make these two points—that it is on the one hand the false economics of the Turks and on the other hand the false economics of the Powers of Europe, coloring the policy and statecraft of both, which have played an enormous, in all human probability, a determining rôle in the immediate cause of the war; and, of course, a further and more remote cause of the whole difficulty is the fact that the Balkan peoples, never having been subjected to the discipline of that complex social life which arises from trade and commerce have not, or at least not so completely, outgrown those primitive racial and religious hostilities which at one time in Europe as a whole provoked conflicts like that now raging in the Balkans. The following article which appeared⁶ at the outbreak of the war may summarise some of the points with which we have been dealing:—