There is at last a base to the pyramid—its very widest point. When that is reached—what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of your machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And if you are an aggressive country that has come late to this business, as Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are already adopted and that all the best bazaar-sites are taken, you may easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to the peace. IV WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines? That industry will be unable to make a profit? No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born—at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. It is usually the case, too, that they have to buy the raw materials on which their machines act, as Great Britain buys raw cotton from the United States and Egypt, and wool from Australia, to feed her great textile industries; having manufactured this material, she sends it forth again as cloth, to be exchanged for wheat in Canada or beef in South America. As you begin with machines your population divides. It becomes part rural and part industrial, and so long as the rural part of it can feed the industrial part there is no trouble. But a time soon comes when the need of the industrial workers for sustenance is greater than the native production of food. This time inevitably comes because the machines call up people so rapidly. Then you have to look abroad for food. That means you have to go into other countries—peasant-countries—where there is a surplus of meat and grain, and exchange there your manufactured goods for food. And you begin to think and speak of your economic necessity. There is no such necessity really. To assert it is to say a preposterous thing, namely, that when your industrial population has increased beyond the native food-supply, to a point at which you are out of balance, you are obliged to import food so that your industrial population may continue to increase and your cities to grow and your necessity to become greater and greater in an endless spiral. It cannot be endless. One of two things will determine the sequel. Either presently the resources of those peasant-nations that produce a surplus of food will be exhausted or they will in time think to become industrial nations, too, and eat their own surplus. There is no lucid reason why a population should not disperse as it begins to exceed the native food-supply—that is to say, migrate to the sources of food.