Now, whatever the future may have in store, it will certainly have for France the task of defending her conquests if she either withholds their product (particularly iron) from the peoples of Central Europe who need them, or if she makes of their possession a means of exacting a tribute which they feel to be burdensome and unjust. Again we are faced by the same dilemma; if Germany gets the iron, her population goes on expanding and her potential power of resistance goes on increasing. Thus France's burden of defence would grow steadily greater, while her population remained constant or declined. This difficulty of French deficiency in human raw material is not a remote contingency; it is an actual difficulty of to-day, which France is trying to meet in part by the arming of the negro population of her African colonies, and in part by the device of satellite militarisms, as in Poland. But the precariousness of such methods is already apparent. The arming of the African negro carries its appalling possibilities on its face. Its development cannot possibly avoid the gravest complication of the industrial problem. It is the Servile State in its most sinister form; and unless Europe is itself ready for slavery it will stop this reintroduction of slavery for the purposes of militarism. The other device has also its self-defeating element. To support an imperialist Poland means a hostile Russia; yet Poland, wedged in between a hostile Slav mass on the one side and a hostile Teutonic one on the other, herself compounded of Russian, German, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Jewish elements, ruled largely by a landowning aristocracy when the countries on both sides have managed to transfer the great estates to the peasants, is as likely, in these days, to be a military liability as a military asset. These things are not irrelevant to the problem of turning military power to economic account: they are of the very essence of the problem. Not less so is this consideration: If France should for political reasons persist in a policy which means a progressive reduction in the productivity of Europe, that policy would be at its very roots directly contrary to the vital interests of England. The foregoing pages have explained why the increasing population of these islands, that live by selling coal or its products, are dependent upon the high productivity of the outside world. France is self-supporting and has no such pre-occupation. Already the divergence is seen in the case of the Russian policy. Britain direly needs the wheat of Russia to reduce the cost of living--or improve the value of what she has to sell, which is very nearly the same thing. France does not need Russian foodstuffs, and in terms of narrow self-interest (cutting her losses in Czarist bonds) can afford to be indifferent to the devastation of Russia. As soon as this divergence reaches a certain degree, rupture becomes inevitable.