Logical extremes are fictions of thought. It is always another thing that happens. The one impossibility is for trade to wear in its present character. It has come to the end of its theory, witness the dread with which European statesmen, economists, and industrialists regard the payment of German reparations. How shall Germany pay? In goods. There is no other way. She cannot pay in gold. There is not that much gold in the whole world. The Allied creditors actually lend her a little gold in order that she may recover from her amazing act of bankruptcy and get back to the way of producing exportable wealth. But to whom shall she deliver her goods, or sell them? Great Britain does not want them. Her anxiety is how to keep her own factories going. They make the same goods. France does not wish them, nor Belgium, nor Italy, nor the United States, and all for the same reason. They have a potential surplus of industrial commodities from their own machines. Then shall Germany sell her goods in other markets and turn the money proceeds over to Great Britain, France, _et al_? But they themselves need those other markets on which to sell their own industrial products. German competition is not wanted there. Thus an _impasse_. If, in desperation, the Allied creditors forgave Germany her reparation debt, or so much of it as she should be obliged to pay in competitive goods, that would be still worse. For Germany would then compete in those other markets on her own initiative and keep the profit. And all the time those other markets, in Asia, Africa, South America, tend to become less and less exploitable because they belong to people who have begun to found industries of their own and are in the way to be natively supplied with manufactures. VII DIM VISTAS NEW It must occur to you that what the world requires to find is a new conception of commerce among nations—one that shall be free of the predatory impulse, above the exploiting motive, competitive in some nobler sense. It need not be magnanimous or unselfish—not yet; but only enlightened enough to comprehend the latter meaning of events. For a superseding principle the perfect pattern is represented in nature, where you see dissimilar organisms existing together in a state of symbiosis, one sustaining the other, vitally interdependent, yet neither exploiting the other. There is no accrual of advantage to one side, no gain, no favourable balance of trade. One gives exactly as much as it receives and two wants are equally satisfied, with nothing to boot either way. This is very different from parasitism, which is one-sided, for gain only. And there is a very curious suggestion that organisms now existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once parasitic and learned better.