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 cooeperation. 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.