head.  But under capitalism, owing to competition for jobs, a worker who either produces much or consumes little is the natural enemy of the others; thus the system makes for inefficient work, and creates an opposition between the general interest and the individual interest of the wage-earner.  The case of yellow labour in America and the British Dominions is one of the most unfortunate instances of the artificial conflicts of interest produced by the capitalist system.  This whole question of Asiatic immigration, which is liable to cause trouble for centuries to come, can only be radically solved by Socialism, since Socialism alone can bring the private interests of workers in this matter into harmony with the interests of their nation and of the world.

The concentration of the world’s capital in a few nations, which, by means of it, are able to drain all other nations of their wealth, is obviously not a system by which permanent peace can be secured except through the complete subjection of the poorer nations.  In the long run, China will see no reason to leave the profits of industry in the hands of foreigners.  If, for the present, Russia is successfully starved into submission to foreign capital, Russia also will, when the time is ripe, attempt a new rebellion against the world-empire of finance.  I cannot see, therefore, any establishment of a stable world-system as a result of the syndicate formed at Washington.  On the contrary, we may expect that, when Asia has thoroughly assimilated our economic system, the Marxian class-war will break out in the form of a war between Asia and the West, with America as the protagonist of capitalism, and Russia as the champion of Asia and Socialism.  In such a war, Asia would be fighting for freedom, but probably too late to preserve the distinctive civilizations which now make Asia valuable to the human family.  Indeed, the war would probably be so devastating that no civilization of any sort would survive it.

To sum up:  the real government of the world is in the hands of the big financiers, except on questions which rouse passionate public interest.  No doubt the exclusion of Asiatics from America and the Dominions is due to popular pressure, and is against the interests of big finance.  But not many questions rouse so much popular feeling, and among them only a few are sufficiently simple to be incapable of misrepresentation in the interests of the capitalists.  Even in such a case as Asiatic immigration, it is the capitalist system which causes the anti-social interests of wage-earners and makes them illiberal.  The existing system makes each man’s individual interest opposed, in some vital point, to the interest of the whole.  And what applies to individuals applies also to nations; under the existing economic system, a nation’s interest is seldom the same as that of the world at large, and then only by accident.  International peace might conceivably be secured under the present