It has been impossible to part with the notion that there must be gain in trade—a profit on one side beyond the mutual satisfaction of unlike wants with unlike goods. Hence the term, balance of trade, meaning the balance in your favour, or against you, from the transactions of commerce. The rule is that the industrial nations come out each year with a balance in their favour. The countries with whom they have been exchanging machine-made goods for food and raw materials owe them money. This simply means that the industrial nations charge more for what they sell than they pay for what they buy. Hence the gain. That is how they get rich. It is more than a rule: it is the very principle of trade; and if you say there is any other principle the commercial mind becomes instantly stark. What would activate trade if not the hope of gain? Nevertheless, trade on that principle is bound to fail, as piracy failed, and for the same practical reason. On a vast scale, with unlimited participation, it is not continuously feasible. Every nation cannot have a favourable trade-balance. So long as three or four nations had a monopoly of machines and machine-craft, it could be managed; it could even assume such colossal proportions as to create the illusion of being permanent as the way of the world. That monopoly is broken. The machine is increasingly a common possession. Its power is dispersed, and there is much new and unbidden ecstasy in the exercise of it. And whereas it was that a few nations exploited many, what now opens to view is the prospect of all nations simultaneously engaged in the effort to exploit one another. Every frontier a trade wall. Each nation forbidding others to do unto it that which it is bent upon doing to them. So we return to the middle of the sixteenth century, no wiser than the British were when the Parliament voted _An Act Avoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made by Handicraftsmen Beyond the Seas_ (_5 Eliz. c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 428-429), 1562_. It reads: Whereas heretofore the artificers of this realm of England (as well within the city of London as within other cities, towns, and boroughs of the same real) that is to wit, girdlers, cutlers, saddlers, glovers, point-makers, and such like handicraftsmen, have been in the said faculties greatly wrought, and greatly set on work, as well for the sustentation of themselves, their wives, and families, as for a good education of a great part of the youth of this realm in good art and laudible exercise: