Suppose Great Britain to be to-morrow at war with one or more of the Great Powers of Europe.  All the sailing vessels and slow steamers will stop running lest they should be taken by hostile cruisers.  The fast steamers will have to pay war rates of insurance and to charge extra freights.  Steamers ready to leave foreign ports for this country will wait for instructions and for news.  On the outbreak of war, therefore, this over-sea traffic must be greatly diminished in volume and carried on with enormously increased difficulties.  The supply of food would be considerably reduced and the certainty of the arrival of any particular cargo would have disappeared.  The price of food must therefore rapidly and greatly rise, and that alone would immediately impose very great hardships on the whole of the working class, of which a considerable part would be driven across the line which separates modern comfort from the starvation margin.  The diminution in the supply of the raw materials of manufacture would be much greater and more immediate.  Something like half the manufacturers of Great Britain must close their works for want of materials.  But will the other half be able to carry on?  Foreign orders they cannot possibly execute, because there can be no certainty of the delivery of the goods; and even if they could, the price at which they could deliver them with a profit would be much higher than it is in peace.  For with a diminished supply the price of raw material must go up, the cost of marine insurance must be added, together with the extra wages necessary to enable the workmen to live with food at an enhanced price.

Thus the effect of the greater difficulty of sea communication must be to destroy the margin of profit which enables the British capitalist to carry on his works, while the effect of all these causes taken together on the credit system upon which our whole domestic economy reposes will perhaps be understood by business men.  Even if this state of things should last only a few months, it certainly involves the transfer to neutrals of all trade that is by possibility transferable.  Foreign countries will give their orders for cotton, woollen, and iron goods to the United States, France, Switzerland, and Austro-Hungary, and at the conclusion of peace the British firms that before supplied them, if they have not in the meantime become bankrupt, will find that their customers have formed new connections.

The shrinkage of credit would bring a multitude of commercial failures; the diminution of trade and the cessation of manufactures a great many more.  The unemployed would be counted by the million, and would have to be kept at the public expense or starve.