British Isles. This will save excessive freight rates, keep down the costly-tariff "overhead," and get the benefit of all the goodwill accruing from the employment of British labour.

A by-product of British exclusion is the inauguration of a Made-in-England campaign. Buy a hat in Regent Street or Oxford Street and you see stamped on the inside band the words, "British Manufacture." This English crusade is more likely to succeed than our Made-in-U.S.A. attempt, for the simple reason that the government is squarely behind it.

This same spirit dominates newspaper publicity. You find a British fountain pen glowingly proclaimed in a big display advertisement, illustrated with the picture of men trundling boxes of gold down to a waiting steamer. Alongside are these words:

"The man who buys a foreign-made fountain pen is paying away gold, even if the money he hands across the counter is a Treasury note. The British shop may get the paper; the foreign manufacturer gets gold for all the pens he sends over here. What is the sense of carrying an empty sovereign-purse in one pocket if you put a foreign-made fountain pen in another?"

Behind all this British exclusion is an old prejudice against our wares. There has never been any secret about it. I found a large body of opinion headed by brilliant men who have bidden farewell to the Hands-Across-the-Sea sentiment; who have little faith in the theory that blood is thicker than water when it comes to a keen commercial clash.

What of the human element behind the whole British awakening? Will organised labour, an ancient sore on the British body, rise up and complicate these well-laid schemes for economic expansion? As with the question of practicability of the Paris Pact, there is a wide difference of opinion.

On one hand, you find the air full of the menace of post-war unemployment and the problem of replacing the woman worker by the man who went away to fight. To offset this, however, there will be the undoubted scarcity of male help due to battle or disease, and the inevitable emigration of the soldier, desirous of a free and open life, to the Colonies.

On the other hand, there is the conviction that unrestricted output, having registered its golden returns, will be the rule, not the exception, among the English artisans. England's frenzied desire for economic authority proclaims a job for everybody.

I asked a member of the British Cabinet, a man perhaps better qualified than any other in England to speak on this subject, to sum up the whole after-war labour situation, as he saw it, and his epigrammatic reply was:

"After the war capital will be ungrudging in its remuneration to labour; and labour, in turn, must be ungrudging in its output."

No one doubts that after the war the British worker will have his full share of profits. As one large manufacturer told me: "We have so gotten into the habit of turning our profits over to the government that it will be easy to divide with our employees." Here may be the panacea for the whole English labour ill.

But, whatever may be the readjustment of this labour problem, one thing is certain: Peace will find a disciplined England. The five million men, trained to military service, will dominate the new English life; and this means that it will be orderly and productive.

With this discipline will come a democracy—social and industrial—such as England has never known. The comradeship between peer and valet, master and man, born of common danger under fire, will find renewal, in part at least, when they go back to their respective tasks. This wiping out of caste in shop, mill and counting room will likewise remove one of the old barriers to the larger prosperity.

England wants the closest trade relations with her Dominions. But will the Colonies accept the idea of a fiscal union of empire, which practically means intercolonial free trade? Or will they want to protect their own industries, even against the Mother Country? Like the French, they are willing to risk life and limb for a cause, but they likewise want to guard jealously their purse and products. They have not forgotten the click when Churchill locked the home door against them.

This leads to the question that is agitating all England: Will peace bring tariff reform? Both English and American economic destiny will be affected by the decision, whatever it may be.

Canvass England and you encounter a widespread movement that means, as the advocates see it, a broadening of the home market; security for the infant "key" industries; a safeguard for British labour—in short, the end of the old inequality of a Free England against a Protected Germany.

Protection in England, hitched to a world-wide freeze-out business campaign against Germany, would doubtless divert a whole new international discount business to New York. German exporters under these circumstances might refuse payments from their other customers on London, demanding bills on New York instead. To hold this business, however, we should need direct banking and cable connections with all the grand divisions of trade, adequate sea-carrying power, dollar credits, and a government friendly to business.

Then, there is the middle English ground which demands a "tariff for revenue only," and subsidy—not protection—for the new industries.

Combating all this is the dyed-in-the-bone free trader, who points to the fact that free trade made England the richest of the Allies and gave her control of the sea. "How can a nation that is one huge seaport, and which lives by foreign trade, ever be a protectionist?" he asks.

If he has his way we shall have to struggle harder for our share of universal business. More than this, it will block what is likely to be one of Germany's schemes for rehabilitation. Here is the possible procedure:

Germany's financial position after the war will be badly strained. She can be saved only by an effective export policy. To do this she must seek all possible neutral markets; and to get them quickly she will offer broad—even extravagant—reciprocity programmes. They may conflict with the proposed Franco-British programmes of protection and embargo against neutral trade interests.

But if the Franco-British programme leaves the allied markets for goods and money open, as before the war, the German reciprocity scheme will fail of its effect by the sheer force of natural competition. Hence England can throttle the re-establishment of German credit by a free and liberal trade policy, open to all the world. Though poor, after the war she can actually be stronger, in view of her great army and navy, her new individual efficiency, and renewed commercial vitality.

Will all this keep Germany out? There are many people, even in England, who think not. Already Germans by the thousands are becoming naturalised citizens of Holland, Spain, Switzerland and Denmark; building factories there and shipping the product into the enemy strongholds, stamped with neutral names. Much of the "Swiss" chocolate you buy in Paris was made by Teutonic hands.

A French manufacturer who bought a grinding machine in Zurich the other day thought it looked familiar; and when he compared it with a picture in a German catalogue he found it was the identical article, made in Germany, which had been offered to him by a Frankfort firm six months before the war began. Only certificates of origin will bar out the German product.

Amid the hatred that the war has engendered, England wonders at the price she will pay for German exclusion. Men like Sir John Simon solemnly assert in