But if today by some sort of magic Britain could kill off all foreigners the means of livelihood for quite an appreciable portion of her population would have disappeared.  Millions would be threatened by actual starvation.  For Britain’s overseas trade, on which so large a proportion of the population actually lives, is mainly with the outside world and not with her own empire.  We have seen what isolation merely from two countries has meant for Great Britain.  Britain is still maintaining her contacts with the world as a whole, but the cessation of relationship with two countries has precipitated the gravest financial crisis known in all her history, has kept her Stock Exchanges closed for months, has sent her Consols to a lower point than any known since the worst period of the Napoleonic wars, and has compelled the Government ruthlessly to pledge its credit for the support of banking institutions and all the various trades that have been most seriously hit.

Nor is Germany’s isolation altogether complete.  She manages through neutral countries and otherwise to maintain a considerable current of relationship with the outside world, but how deeply and disastrously the partial severance of contact has affected Germany we shall not at present, probably at no time, in full measure know.

All this gives a mere hint of what the organized isolation by the entire world would mean to any one nation.  Imagine the position of a civilized country whose ports no ship from another country would enter, whose bills no banker would discount, a country unable to receive a telegram or a letter from the outside world or send one thereto, whose citizens could neither travel in other countries or maintain communications therewith.  It would have an effect in the modern world somewhat equivalent to that of the dreadful edicts of excommunication and interdict which the papal power was able to issue in the mediaeval world.

I am aware, of course, that such a measure would fall very hardly upon certain individuals in the countries inflicting this punishment, but it is quite within the power of the Governments of those countries to do what the British Government has done in the case of persons like acceptors of German bills who found themselves threatened with bankruptcy and who threatened in consequence to create great disturbance around them because of the impossibility of securing payment from the German indorsers.  The British Government came to the rescue of those acceptors, used the whole national credit to sustain them.  It is expensive, if you will, but infinitely less expensive than a war, and, finally, most of the cost of it will probably be recovered.