America are not so near exhaustion, because they have larger resources to draw on aa well as a culture and a population more efficient for industrial work. But there is no evident reason why these two should not likewise enter on a policy of emulative exhaustion, and so sacrifice their aggregate industrial and business interest to the furtherance of the "great game."
The question may suggest itself, Why should not the business community, who have a large discretion in international politics and whose aggregate gains are cut into by excessive war expenditures, call a halt when the critical point is reached ? There is more than one reason for their failure to do so. War and preoccupation with warlike enterprise breed a warlike animus in the community, as well aa a habit of arbitrary, autocratic rule on the part of those in authority and an unquestioning, enthusiastic subservience on the part of the subjects. National animosity and national pride demand more and more of military standing, at the same time that the growing official class needs increasing emoluments and a larger field of employment and display. The cultural effects of the discipline of warfare and
armament are much the same whether it is under' taken for dynastic or for business ends; in either case it takes on a dynastic complexion and breeds the temperament, ideals, and institutional habits proper to a dynastic system of pohtics. The farther it goes the more it comes to make use of business interests as a means rather than an end, as, e.g., in modem Germany, France, and Italy, and in the Continental states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The crown, court, bureaucracy, military establishment, and nobility, under whatever designations, gradually come to their own again in such a situation, and affairs again come to