Dr. Bowley, in his book on England’s foreign trade, puts the matter dramatically as follows:—­

The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization.  It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world.  Nor would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling spectacle.’[30]

This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity of mankind if carried too far through the process of specialization.  While admitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that the specialization process need go quite to that length.  Even if England became one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it must work in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but it is all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley’s eminence should call our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against.  On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris’s ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley.  We might imagine England one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of which might be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruit trees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trained population would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest of their time in intellectual leisure and healthy exercise and home life under ideally happy conditions.

It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another.  In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it.  At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades.  Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned.  When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war.