Only a few years ago Great Britain alone controlled it. She had a monopoly of its power and use by right of having been the first to develop it, and she was for a while the only nation having a large surplus of manufactures to sell in foreign countries. Then came Germany, France, and Belgium. Of these Germany was Great Britain’s most aggressive rival, making nearly all of the same things and most of them cheaper. After 1870 the United States developed industry very fast but for twenty years more her exports were principally agricultural because she herself consumed the entire product of her machines, besides importing manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for meat and grain and raw cotton. It was not until about 1890 that American machine-products began to invade the markets of the world in a large way. And at about the same time Japan appeared as an industrial nation, having in a few years equipped herself with Western machines and trained her imitative hand to mind them. Such, roughly, was the economic state of the world at the outbreak of the War. The powerfully industrialized nations were four in Europe, counting little Belgium; one in the West; and one in the East—six altogether, representing hardly more than one-fifth of the world’s total population. If we regard only the countries where the industrial population had so outrun the native food-supply that the sale of manufactures in foreign lands to pay for food had either become, or was believed to be, a vital transaction, then we count out the United States. This country is still self-nourished. That leaves only five, and the competition among these five for markets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to be instructed in wanting, for private pathways by land and sea to the sources of food, for access to the raw materials required by their machines, was already desperate and dangerous. Between two of them it was deadly. Even then it was so. Since then the machine has multiplied tremendously where its habitat was and has gone migrating, besides, all over the earth.