of traders, gathered under their national flags, are engaged in a conflict in which they are entitled to embroil their governments. By tariff bargaining and by all sorts of diplomatic weapons each government is called upon to assist its nationals and to cripple or exclude the nationals of other states. Now it is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible, and is always expanding; and commercial experience shows that the rapid expansion of the overseas trade of one country does not preclude the expansion of trade of other countries. I do not, of course, deny that at a particular time and in relation to some particular lucrative opportunity, genuine clashes of interests may arise. But, envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce, one feels that the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.

Perhaps the worst of the three fallacies, and in a sense the deepest-rooted, is the concept of export trade as of more value than import trade. This is often traced back to the time when governments deemed it desirable to accumulate in their countries treasures of gold and silver and to this end encouraged the sale of goods abroad and discouraged the payment for them in foreign goods. There are, however, modern supporters of the assumption that it is more important to sell than to buy, although the money received for sales has no other significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes of selling and of buying are complementary.

The economic explanation of the double falsehood of dividing buying from selling and of imputing a higher value to the latter process, lies beyond the scope of this address. But the injuries resulting from the superior pressure upon governments of organized bodies of producers and merchants who have things to sell, to the detriment of the consuming public who have only buying needs, are too grave matters to be neglected here. It is not too much to say that, if the interests of consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a peaceful, harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other single circumstance.

This analysis has seemed necessary in order to clear away the intellectual and moral fogs which prevent a true realization of the economic, and therefore the moral, interdependence of nations. For every bond of economic interest involves moral obligation also. If it is true that the fabric of commercial relations is all the time being knit closer between the different peoples of the earth, then the moral isolation and the antagonism which earlier statecraft inculcated, and which still obsess so many minds, must be dissipated and give place to active sentiments of human coöperation.

There were, indeed, those who thought that already the web of commerce and finance had been woven strong enough to save nations from the calamity of war. Their miscalculation arose from underestimating the power over the mind and the passions of that false image of trade. But because the modern internationalism of commerce and finance did not prove strong enough to stem the full and sudden tide of war passions fed from the barbarous traditions of a dateless past, we ought not to disparage the potentiality of this internationalism as the foundation of a new and better world order. For, though those bonds of common interest broke under the strain of war, the confusion in which we find ourselves without them is itself a terrible testimony to their value. The enforced sundering of ordinary trade relations between members of different countries has taught two clear lessons. The first is this: that hardly any civilized nation is or can be economically independent in respect to essential supplies or industries. There is no European country that does not rely for the subsistence of its inhabitants upon supplies of goods and raw materials from foreign lands, mostly from countries outside the European continent. While Britain both leaned more heavily upon other countries and contributed most to other countries from her surplus produce, every other country, in larger or less degree—great countries such as France, Germany, Austria, Italy, little ones like Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Denmark—were increasingly dependent upon outside sources for their livelihood. It is true that there remained a very few great backward countries, such as Russia and China, where a life of economic isolation was possible had they been willing to dispense with the higher products of civilized industry and with the fertilizing streams of capital without which progress is impossible. No civilized European country was self-sufficing in the vital factors of a productive and progressive civilization—food, raw materials, machinery, fuel, transport, finance, and adequate supplies of skilled labor. The services which countries near or distant rendered to one another were becoming constantly more numerous, more complex, and more urgent. The obstructions and stoppages of war has driven home the lesson painfully to the inhabitants of every European country, belligerent or neutral. What lesson? That we have erred in permitting ourselves to grow dependent on the industry, goodwill, and intercourse of other nations, and that we should endeavor to hark back to an earlier economic state of national independence? Well, there are even in Britain rhetorical politicians who speak of the necessity of retaining all "key" or "essential" industries within their national control—who propose to reverse the tide of social evolution by some flimsy apparatus of tariffs and subsidies. This is impossible. The war has left the European peoples, one and all, more than ever dependent for their economic livelihood upon one another, and upon the material resources and labor of other continents.

The second lesson is that, other things equal, it is the most highly civilized and highly developed countries that are the most dependent upon others. In a word, there is a presumption that economic internationalism is an essential feature of civilization.

You will observe that so far I have made no mention of America. And yet all that I have been saying is, in a sense, introductory to the unique problem presented by this country. America is the only civilized country in the world that is virtually self-sufficing as regards the primary requirements of her economic life. Her soil can and does supply nearly all her essential foods, her natural resources include the materials of her great textile, metal, and other basic industries, the heat, light, electricity, and other forms of natural energy which satisfy her national needs. She has access to skilled and unskilled labor sufficient to develop and utilize all these natural resources. Most of her pre-war imports might be placed under four heads: articles of luxury and taste in dress, jewelry, etc.; certain chemical and other scientific products; supplementary supplies of some foods and materials, from other countries of the American continent, for manufactures and export trade; and a number of tropical products, almost all of subsidiary significance in the production and consumption of the American people. This slight dependence upon foreign countries has been considerably reduced as the result of war exigency. The art products of France and Italy, the fine textile goods from Britain, the dye-stuffs, drugs, and scientific instruments from Germany—in a word, the great bulk of the imports from Europe, have either been