For the purposes of the War, in the various Inter-Allied bodies for the apportionment of shipping and raw material, we had the beginnings of an economic League of Nations, an economic World Government. Those bodies might have been made democratic, and enlarged to include neutral interests, and maintained for the period of Reconstruction (which might in any case have been regarded as a phase properly subject to war treatment in these matters). But these international organisations were allowed to fall to pieces on the removal of the common enmity which held the European Allies and America together. The disappearance of these bodies does not mean the disappearance of 'controls,' but the controls will now be exercised in considerable part through vast private Capitalist Trusts dealing with oil, meat, and shipping. Nor will the interference of government be abolished. If it is considered desirable to ensure to some group a monopoly of phosphates, or palm nuts, the aid of governments will be invoked for the purpose. But in this case the government will exercise its powers not as the result of a publicly avowed and agreed principle, but illicitly, hypocritically. While professing to exercise a 'mandate' for mankind, a government will in fact be using its authority to protect special interests. In other words we shall get a form of internationalism in which the international capitalist Trust will control the Government instead of the Government's controlling the Trust. The fact that this was happening more and more before the War was one reason why the old individualist order has broken down. More and more the professed position and function of the State was not its real position and function. The amount of industry and trade dependent upon governmental intervention (enterprises of the Chinese Loan and Bagdad Railway type) before the War was small compared with the quantity that owed nothing to governmental protection. But the illicit pressure exercised upon governments by those interested in the exploitation of backward countries was out of proportion to the public importance of their interests. It was this failure of democratic control of 'big business' by the pre-war democracies which helped to break down the old individualism. While private capital was apparently gaining control over the democratic forces, moulding the policy of democratic governments, it was in fact digging its own grave. If political democracy in this respect had been equal to its task, or if the captains of industry had shown a greater scruple or discernment in their use of political power, the individualist order might have given us a workable civilisation; or its end might have been less painful.