Now, when we talk thus of “German” trade in the international field, what do we mean?  Here is the ironmaster in Essen making locomotives for a light railway in an Argentine province, (the capital for which has been subscribed in Paris)—­which has become necessary because of the export of wool to Bradford, where the trade has developed owing to sales in the United States, due to high prices produced by the destruction of sheep runs, owing to the agricultural development of the West.

But for the money found in Paris, (due, perhaps, to good crops in wine and olives, sold mainly in London and New York,) and the wool needed by the Bradford manufacturer, (who has found a market for blankets among miners in Montana, who are smelting copper for a cable to China, which is needed because the encouragement given to education by the Chinese Republic has caused Chinese newspapers to print cable news from Europe)—­but for such factors as these, and a whole chain of equally interdependent ones throughout the world, the ironmaster in Essen would not have been able to sell his locomotives.

How, therefore, can you describe it as part of the trade of “Germany” which is in competition with the trade of “Britain” or “France” or “America”?  But for the British, French, and American trade, it could not have existed at all.  You may say that if the Essen ironmaster could have been prevented from selling his locomotives the order would have gone to an American one.

[Illustration:  H.M.  PETER I

King of Servia]

[Illustration:  WALTER H. PAGE

American Ambassador to Great Britain

(Photo from Paul Thompson)]

But this community of German workmen, called into existence by the Argentina trade, maintains by its consumption of coffee a plantation in Brazil, which buys its machinery in Chicago.  The destruction, therefore, of the Essen trade, while it might have given business to the American locomotive maker, would have taken it from, say, an American agricultural implement maker.  The economic interests involved sort themselves, irrespective of the national groupings.  I have summarized the whole process as follows, and the need for getting some of these simple things straight is my excuse for quoting myself: 

Co-operation between nations has become essential for the very life of their peoples.  But that co-operation does not take place as between States at all.  A trading corporation, “Britain” does not buy cotton from another corporation, “America.”  A manufacturer in Manchester strikes a bargain with a merchant in Louisiana in order to keep a bargain with a dyer in Germany, and three or a much larger number of parties enter into virtual, or, perhaps, actual, contract, and form a mutually dependent economic community, (numbering, it may be, with the work people in the group of industries involved, some millions of individuals)—­an economic entity, so far as one can exist, which does not