For see what would happen if people all over the world should return of a sudden to the former ways of thrift—to the habit of doing without? There would be depression in industry. Machines would stop. Millions who tend them would be disemployed. Nothing would be safe, not even your own money, for there would be panic on the exchange and trouble at the bank. One is not speaking of the United States alone. The multiplication of things is greater here than anywhere else because we make machines faster and work them harder; but you will find the same necessity acting also in France, the very cradle of thrift, where now cheap motors are sold on credit: anyone who will buy may borrow the money to buy with. Why is this in France? To stimulate the motor habit? To serve a private profit-motive? The habit will follow; the profit may. But there is another reason, touching foreign trade, which we are coming to elucidate. In order to sell abroad, an industrial nation must be able to produce cheaply. To produce cheaply, it must produce in large quantities by a multiple method called mass-production. And you can safely manage this mass-production only provided you have a fairly large and constant base of domestic demand. So the sale of French motor-cars in France, though it be on credit, must be large enough to support the method of mass-production, for otherwise France would be unable to meet the competition of Ford, who now exports motor-cars to Europe—even builds them there. Then the British manufacturers, to meet the competition of both France and Ford, also undertake against their genius to produce motor-cars by the quantity method, and, having achieved the method, their next dilemma is what to do with the product. They advertize at home to create a popular motor-car habit and at the same time press their cars for sale in foreign markets, even in France and Germany, as these countries press theirs for sale in Great Britain. Competition among industrial nations to exploit one another’s internal markets is but one profile of all that dangerous activity taking place in the name of foreign trade. The industrial powers holding their feet in China’s doorway and France fighting the native in Morocco are other aspects of the same thing. China so long as possible shall be an open market for the surplus product of western machines; there shall be more wanting in Morocco.