spheres of influence, dominion of overland and water routes that trade might expand; lack of national morality, and "The Will to Power." I thought I knew and understood it all.
Late in 1916 I dropped in upon Dr. Talcott Williams, as he spoke at the civic forum in Brookline, Massachusetts. I wanted to get his measure and divine what line of talent he might be turning out at Columbia for financial journalism. To my astonishment I got a new angle from which to view my own ignorance as to the causes of modern wars. I had thought that, while economic conditions were basal under Germany's most audacious war and Russia's long continued preparation for defense, certainly race and religion were at the root of troubles in the Balkans, in Turkey, and the Far East. But here again was the ever-lasting "bread-and-butter problem" or bread, even without butter, problem.
Dr. Williams showed from first-hand knowledge, and fifty years' reflection thereon, that our boasted Christian civilization, whatever it might be in its endings, was in its beginnings the disrupter of states and nations; that where villages and communities in the Balkans, in Turkey, in Africa, and in the Far East had existed
