Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/92

 laws pertaining to them, but not from the point of view of war or peace.

One of the lessons of the war has been that every order of society must foster the interests of peace equally. We have learnt that every effort must be made to achieve one aim, the aim which removes the obstacles between class and state interests and which furthers the safety of humanitv, in order to regulate armaments automatically and to bring peace under the protection of new institutions and to remove international anarchy. Capitalism, the régime of the bourgeoisie, and patriotism, cannot support a repetition of the present world war any more than social democracy. A war of such dimensions ceases to be a rational weapon of imperialism. The enormity of modern war is also the bankruptcy of imperialism, for the victors themselves are unable to draw any serious advantages from it. Moreover, the destructive power of such a war will increase from year to year in proportion to the advance of modern science.

During the war, many people thought that they could trace the cause of the war to the spheres of culture. Either side glorified its own culture, and considered it incompatible with that of the other party. This theory, however, is the product of the diseased mental atmosphere of the war, and is entirely untenable. When some time ago a German book with this tendency came into my hands—for instance, the work of H. Chamberlain—concerning the superiority of the German genius and German culture, for which it is