of the Transvaal had a definite interest in transferring the country from Boer to British rule, and the press and other. political propaganda which secured this end were owned or controlled by these financial and industrial groups.
It will be said by those who controvert this economic causation of Imperialism that the Boer War was an exceptional case, and that the causation of the Great War lay outside the economic purview. It was power politics, not profit politics. But I am not here arguing the case for an exclusively or even a mainly economic causation of modern Wars. It is not yet clear how far and in what sense the enlargement of national territory or external control underlay the policy of Germany, Russia, or France, in loosing the forces of war. Still less is it reasonable to suppose that calculations of economic gains resulting from territorial changes governed the minds of the statesmen who were responsible for their country entering the war. But in the Peace arrangements the insane mentality of Versailles carried various illusions of an economic character. That annexation was profitable to the annexing country, that the extortion of huge reparation payments was possible and advantageous to the recipients, that national economic self-sufficiency; aided by tariffs and embargoes, was not only strategically but economically gainful — these and other related fallacies flowed from the heated atmosphere of a poisoned nationalism. Nor can it be held that the experience of the post-war period has altogether exploded these fallacies, and that we now know that territorial expansion does not increase the trade gains and the average wealth of the people of the imperialist power.
If we turn to the three Powers which by their professed policies are the chief disturbers of world-peace at the present time, Italy, Germany and Japan, we perceive that each of them pleads economic necessities of territorial
