Free Trade is, in fact, only a practical proposal between countries prepared also for free movements of population between each other and for a pooling of their defensive resources and foreign policy. The way to permanent and satisfactory Free Trade lies in a steady extension of leagues between friendly peoples prepared for that much waiver of their sovereign independence. But only peoples near the same educational level and with closely similar standards of comfort and behaviour can contemplate so intimate a union as this. There might be such a league of the Latin-American States, or of the English-speaking and Scandinavian and other North-European States, but not of any much more extensive coalescences at present. So long as a State remains potentially at war with any other State, Free Trade between them is a dream. Great Britain in the Victorian period had a practical monopoly of modern industrial production and benefited by an open frontier that gave her workers cheap food and so kept labour cheap. That was a temporary and now vanished condition of affairs. So long as States insist on their sovereign independence they must be prepared to use tariffs just as they must be prepared to use armies. It is the price of the flag. Tariffs corrupt. That is true, just as war contracts do. But the way to escape from these diseases of conflict does not lie in the maintenance of fiscal non-resistance by this or that independent, irresponsible State, but in a creative foreign policy that seeks union and coalescence, and aims, openly and educationally, through coalescence in a broadening series, to reach at last world Free Trade, world freedom of movement, and an organised world peace. But Mr. Asquith will never tell us he means anything so intelligible as that. He will just wave the banner of Free Trade as though it meant anything the imagination of the voter might like. That was how the giants did their business in the grand old days, and he will never do his business in any other way. And it is because of these splendid old traditions of pompous vagueness that more and more of the liberal-minded people of Britain drift towards the Labour camp. XII POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE 1.12.23 In the United States of America they know when their elections are coming, and prepare for them; in Great Britain they come unheralded, like earthquakes and tidal waves. They may come and come again; there is no period of immunity.