War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them crippled because international exchange is interrupted.  International trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown to depend on the assumption that peace is secure.  Unless the present war should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that all nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries with which war may be regarded as impossible.  If this be so, then unity through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in its narrower scope.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

A.L.  Bowley, England’s Foreign Trade.  Swan Sonnenschein.

C.K.  Hobson, The Export of Capital.  Constable.

W.S.  Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange.  Kegan Paul, Trench,
Truebner & Co.

Smith’s Wealth of Nations, chs. i-iv.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 24:  Wealth of Nations, Bk.  I, ch. ii.]

[Footnote 25:  1 Kings ix.]

[Footnote 26:  Rawlinson’s translation.]

[Footnote 27:  Jevons, Money as Mechanism of Exchange, p. 1.]

[Footnote 28:  Motley, United Netherlands, ch. xxxiii.]

[Footnote 29:  Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, ch. xx.]

[Footnote 30:  England’s Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century, by A.L.  Bowley.]

X

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classes within the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded by wilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably defined by the Roman Catholic Church as invincible.  To say that unemployment in the mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affects the happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers and the great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depresses the national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughout the kingdom—­to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorous while any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strata remains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentally undeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as a people, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many of us in these days to state truisms.  Yet it is not so long ago that facts which we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate, were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said ‘Socialist’ as Mr. Pecksniff