With his first speech in England Hughes created a sensation.  Before he came commercial feeling against Germany ran high.  Hughes crystallised it into a definite cry.  He said what eight out of every ten men in the street were thinking.  His voice became the Voice of Empire.  Up and down England and before cheering crowds he preached the doctrine of trade war to the death on Germany.  He denounced the laxness that had permitted the “German taint to run like a cancer through the fair body of English trade”; he urged complete economic independence of the Dominions.  His persistent plea was, “We must have the fruits of victory”; and those fruits, he declared, comprised all the trade that Germany had hitherto enjoyed, and as much more as could be lawfully gained.

He urged that the blood brotherhood of empire, quickened by that dramatic S.O.S. call for men across the sea and cemented by the common trench hazard, be followed by a union of empire after the war that should be self-sufficient.  Behind all this eloquent talk of protection and prohibition lay the first real menace to America’s new place as a world trade power.  It was the opening call to arms for the war after the war.

Hughes did more than set England to thinking in imperial terms.  He upset most of the calculations of the Powers That Be who invited him.  They expected an amiable, able and plastic counsellor; they got an oratorical live wire, who would not be ruled, and who shocked deep-rooted free-trade convictions to the core.  He helped to launch a whole new era of thought and action; and the next chapter of its progress was now to be recorded under circumstances pregnant with meaning for the whole universe of trade.

The second winter of war had passed, and with it much of the dark night that enshrouded the Allies’ arms.  On land and sea rained the first blows of the great assaults that were to make a summer of content for the Entente cause.  Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit; victory, however distant, seemed at last assured.  The time had come to prepare a new kind of drive—­the combined attack upon enemy trade and any other that happened to be in the way.

Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked the Seine, in Paris.  Eminent lawmakers—­Hughes, of Australia, among them—­were there aplenty; but few practical business men.

On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic flowed in happier and serener days.  For coming generations of business everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic Conference of the Allies was about to reshape those maps and change the channels of commerce.

All the while, and less than a hundred miles away, Verdun seethed with death; still nearer brewed the storm of the Somme.