For it is not merely the direct sacrifice of the wider world economy of production and exchange, the advantage of a wider over a narrower area of free commerce, that is involved. It is the indirect perils and costs of the policy of close nationalism or restricted economic alliances that count heaviest. For economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries. This is the temptation held out to the British people today by the protectionist interests working upon the animosity of the war spirit and the sentiment of imperialism. The welding of an empire into an independent economic system, the conservation of essential or key industries and the safeguarding of our industries against "dumping," are the ostensible objectives of a policy whose chief driving motive and end is the establishment of strong industrial, commercial and financial trusts and combinations, defended by tariff walls, and endowed with the profits of monopoly. There are two difficulties in such a course of action, which, though especially urgent in the case of Britain, beset every great country that chooses the same path, and not least, America. The first is the fomentation of a class war, based upon divisions of interests between capital and labor, producer and consumer, protected and unprotected industries. The initial skirmishes of such a conflict are already visible in every country where wages, prices, and profiteering are burning issues. I would most earnestly appeal to thoughtful citizens in this as in my own country to pause before heaping fuel on these fires. For the policy of national self-sufficiency or isolation means nothing less than this. Not merely does it strengthen the power of capitalistic combinations and thereby incite labor unions to direct action, blackmailing demands, and sabotage. Not merely does it let loose upon the business world all sorts of ill-considered governmental interferences for the fixation of prices or subsidies to consumers. It keeps alive and feeds the habit and the spirit of strife. For it was no accident that the great international war left as its legacy smaller international class wars in European countries. Remove from a nation the economic supports it formerly received from other nations, markets wherein to buy and sell, and you starve that nation; and starvation breeds class war and anarchy. Can any one doubt this with the terrible examples of Russia and Hungary before their eyes? But it is not a matter of war conditions alone. Carry through a policy of economic nationalism, under which all the large and well-equipped nations and empires conserve for their exclusive uses the national resources they command, and what happens? The smaller and the poorer nations, however free in the political sense, become their economic bond slaves, at the mercy of the master states for their foods and other necessaries of life.