In those six countries that were already intensively industrialized what appears? Their machine equipment has greatly increased. During the War it increased for obvious reasons. God was on the side of the most machines. Since the War it has continued to increase for other reasons. One reason was peculiar to Germany. There the building of furnaces, factories, and machine-works by a dynastic method, as the pyramids were built, without credit or gold, simply by command of the industrialists over labour and material, was a way of baffling the Allied creditors. Another reason was peculiar to France. Restoring the industries of the devastated regions meant building them a second time, since they had been already once reproduced elsewhere in France during the War. But the reason over all lay in that fixed idea of economic necessity, not changed in the least by anything that had happened, only now more desperate than ever, owing both to the intensified competition of the older countries among themselves and to the spread of the machine into other countries. How the competition among themselves has been intensified may be illustrated in the case of textiles as between Great Britain and France. Before the War both imported raw cotton and exported fabrications of cotton; but, whereas Great Britain exported principally the cotton cloth of universal commerce, France exported special products representing her genius for style and artistry. Now, however, having made large additions to her general textile equipment, France feels obliged to compete directly with Great Britain in cotton-cloth of common commerce. To do this she must extend her foreign trade parallel to Great Britain’s and divide the markets hitherto dominated by the British. As with cotton-cloth, so with other manufactures, particularly those of iron and steel, wherein France proposes to compete and is equipped to compete with both Germany and Great Britain as never before. Each step she takes in this direction augments her economic necessity, for now almost the last thing you would expect to see in France is taking place. The native population as a whole is static, but its character is changing. The industrial part of it is growing; the agricultural part is waning. People are deserting the fields to embrace industrial life—to mind machines. In every city there is a housing problem; public credit is employed to build small dwellings for the wage-earners; yet in the country, two hours from Paris, you will see houses empty and going to ruin, whole rural villages in the way to be abandoned, vineyards perishing for want of care, fields going to grass instead of grain. Their industrial power is rising; their agricultural power is falling. Before the War they were, or might have been, self-nourishing on their own soil like the people of the United States. That precious security they cast away. In place of it they take on the anxieties of empire. They must impose upon Morocco the blessings of