The Chinese instance is poignant. A few years ago—until the War, in fact—China exported food and raw materials and imported manufactured goods—nothing else to speak of either way. This was as the Western industrial nations wished it to be. So anxious were they to have it so that they bound China by treaty not to put tariff barriers against the goods they wished to sell in the Chinese markets, except by mutual consent—that is to say, with their consent. The War suspended this thraldom. The Chinese imported machines and began to make their own things, especially cloth. Power-looms appeared as by magic. And after the War, they continued to appear. During three years after the War the number trebled, and in 1922, the table of Chinese imports and exports presented a strange face. Among her imports were machines and machine-parts; also semimanufactured goods to be finished in Chinese factories. And one-fifth of her total exports consisted of manufactured goods. China an exporter of machine products! And so up and down the earth. In Brazil, where there was hardly any visible production of artificial things before 1914, the whole outlook has changed. That country is now able from her own machines to meet the whole of her want for matches, textiles, footgear, wallpaper, phonograph-discs, hardware, hats, and playing cards, and will soon be self-supplied with practically everything she needs. The Colonial System that was to have answered forever Great Britain’s need for raw materials and food in exchange for machine-products will not hold in that character. In India the revolt is political; elsewhere it is peaceably economic. Canada is already powerfully machined; she is exporting motor-cars. Australia, going in the same direction, is beginning to export shoes. The Union of South Africa takes steps to subsidize local industry. Ireland no sooner gains control of her economic life than she puts a tariff-wall around herself to limit the sale of foreign goods, meaning British goods as well, thinking thereby to foster infant industries. Well, everyone now is doing that. The old industrial countries, too, are protecting themselves against one another’s goods, the last to come to it being Great Britain herself. For more than half-a-century she was the protagonist of free trade, abhoring tariffs, because she was paramount in machine-craft and could beat her rivals both in their own markets and in her own. That advantage having departed from her, she is driven to tariff-protection: she puts up barriers against other people’s goods if they are too cheap, because they are too cheap, and calls it Safeguarding Home Industries. V THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS What does it mean? Can there be too many desirable and useful things? Can things be too cheap? You would say No. Surely, so long as any human want remains unsatisfied, things cannot be either too plentiful or too cheap? But there is another dimension.