There is still another factor:  No matter who wins, peace must mean prosperity for everybody.  For the victor it will take the form of an attempted stewardship of trade and navigation; for the vanquished it will be the dedication of a terrible energy to the twin restoration of pride and product.

Now you begin to see why it is up to the United States to make ready for whatever business fate awaits her beyond the uncertain frontiers of to-morrow.  Nor have we been without warning of what may be in store for us.  Prohibitive tariffs, blacklists and boycotts, embargoes on mail and cargo, the exclusion from England and France of hundreds of our manufactured articles—­all show which way the international trade winds may blow when the belligerents begin to take toll of their losses.  Meantime, what are the facts?

Take the case of England.  Thirty years ago she was the workshop of the world.  From the Tyne to the Thames her factories hummed with ceaseless industry.  Her goods went wherever her ships steamed, and that meant the globe.  Supreme in her insularity—­at once her defence and her undoing—­she became infected with the virus of content.  Her steel was the best steel; her wares led all the rest.  “Take it or leave it!” was her selling maxim.  When devices came along that saved labour and increased production she refused to scrap the old to make way for the new.  Born, too, was the evil of restricted output.  Moss began to grow on her vaunted industrial structure.  England lagged in the trade procession.

But as she lagged the assimilative German streamed in through her hospitable door.  He served his apprenticeship in British mills; took home the secrets and methods of British art and craft.  He geared them to cheap labour, harnessed product to masterful distribution, and became a World Power.  Before long he had annexed the dye trade; was competing with British steel; was making once-cherished British goods.

What the German did in England he duplicated elsewhere.  The world of ideas was his field and, with insatiate hunger, he garnered them in.  He cunningly acquired the sources of raw supply, especially the essentials to national defence; for he overlooked nothing.  All was grist to his mills.  He pitched his tents upon debatable trade lands.  His rivals called it economic penetration, because he invariably took root.  For him it was merely good business.

Then England suddenly realised that Germany had left her behind in the race for international commerce.  Indifference lay at the root of this backsliding.  It was easier and cheaper to buy the German-made product and reship it than to produce the same article at home.  Sloth hung like a chain on English energy.  What did it matter?  No forest of bayonets hemmed her in; she was still Mistress of the Seas.

Meantime Germany dripped with efficiency and ached with expansion.  Her amazing teamwork between state and business, stimulated by an interested finance, drove her on to a place in the sun.  The shadows seemed far away when the great war crashed into civilisation.  Then England woke to the folly of her blindness.  The mystery of coal-tar products was shut up in a German laboratory; the secrets of tungsten, necessary to the toughest steel, were imprisoned in a Teutonic mill; and so on down a long list of products vital to industry and defence.