said ‘Pagan’, had the temerity to point out, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was and could be no stronger than its weakest link.  Even now, in the reaction, often only half conscious, of the employing class against any force which tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed from that on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike of education, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace but breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of excitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general belief in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually, we are all members one of another.  And if the truth of our interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon.  That, doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers.  He does not regard them as practical.  The persons engaged in promoting them he defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be suppressed as dangerous.

The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependence of countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on the journalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning, but it was light of the crudest kind.  The result of the illumination, in numerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflect with astonishment on the number of things which this country is in the habit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her folly in not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficiently high, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need the enemy’s products, they would never buy any of them again.  To do them justice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actual difficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which the source had suddenly dried up.  Those who sat in factory offices ruefully contemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium, and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not, even while they set about inventing something that should replace this contribution, belittle what they had lost.  They knew, and said, that while they were confident of producing a working substitute, they did not pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed to be the special gift of the