It may be objected that the United States, the full manufacturing activities of which remain unimpaired by the withdrawal of labour for military purposes and the output of which is not absorbed to so great an extent as it is with us for war material, have for that reason already a great start of Great Britain in all foreign markets. To this objection I would reply that the time for the struggle for the Argentine and Uruguayan markets is hardly yet; because climatic accident still recently produced results which, coupled with the falling on them of the shadow of the Great Terror, suspended their purchasing power. Two very lean years of cereal production due to weather, the occurrence of two consecutive seasons of which is without parallel in these countries’ history, were followed by another perilously rainy harvest time complicated by shortage of harvest labour due to war risks, and imagined risks, of the transport of the usual army of Italian harvesters who (like the _Golondrinas_—swallows—after which they are nicknamed in South America) annually go to Argentina and Uruguay[19] and return to Italy after the harvest has been got in. These causes temporarily paralysed Argentine and Uruguayan commercial activity by, as has been said, suspending the purchasing powers of both. But with the productive recovery[20] of these countries with their enormous natural endowments and producing as they do all the foodstuffs that the populations of poor war-trampled Europe need most, what a call for all kinds of agricultural machinery will come from them in return for their meat and cereals and in order that more and more land may be laid under contribution for the production of these primarily necessary supplies! Failing other labour sources, an augmented stream of Italian “swallow” and permanent emigration will set out for the River Plate, wealth will develop on both shores of that river, and with wealth the demand for all the manufactured things to the desire for which wealth gives rise. Hardware, cutlery, cotton and woollen cloths, electrical appliances and material; the host of things which Britain makes and Germany once sold will come into increasing demand in South America with the spring of the new era on which the whole civilized world will enter when the blackness of devastation shall have passed and the evil which created it be rendered powerless for further ruinous crime.