A brilliant Belgian economist suggests that only the most efficient equipment will survive, and only enough of that to satisfy the natural demand for goods. All the rest must be abandoned because there will be no profit in working it. Well, it remains to be seen if people will abandon their machines without a struggle, purely for rational reasons. Much more is it likely that the higher cost of working the less efficient equipment will be compensated by a lower wage-rate, unemployment being the workers’ alternative. Moreover, if all the inefficient and unnecessary machines were scrapped that would mean only postponement of the sequel. The competition would begin all over again. There are those who suggest that we are facing toward the mercantile system of the Middle Ages, when it was the custom for each nation jealously to protect its home-market from the competitive handicrafts of other nations, and to prohibit or punitively tax the exportation of raw material to rival countries. So we are. To say it is merely to indicate the rock upon which, if nothing happens, the ship of trade is bound to wreck herself. A growing light on the actions of trade as it is organized by the industrial powers now impels nations hitherto agricultural to found industries of their own. As producers of foodstuffs and raw materials to be exchanged for machine-products they came to have a sense of being exploited. In academic theory this was an exchange by which the industrial nation satisfied its food wants and the agricultural nation its industrial wants, to mutual advantage. But how came the industrial nation also to acquire wealth by the transaction? Performing the preferred industrial task, it got not only its food but a profit over. What else could it mean but that after a series of years the industrial nation should come to have large interest-bearing investments in the agricultural country, owning its railroads, tramways, water works, and banks? What else could it mean but that the richest country in foreign investments was the one that had been for the longest time engaged in exchanging the surplus product of its machines for the food and raw materials of other countries? How was it that those other countries, after having served her for many years with food and raw materials, invariably owed her a great deal of money? Or, if you approach it from the other point of view, you find in the economic literature of industrial nations a certain finished doctrine, which is that the exchange of manufactured goods for food and raw materials is a business that pays. It is not primarily a vital transaction. It becomes vital by extension—that is to say, when in the course of time the industrial population has increased beyond the native food supply. But in the beginning the motive is gain. Nakedly, it is an exchange of skilled labour for unskilled labour, to the enrichment of the former; it is a division of labour among nations on a kind of caste plan.