Examine for a moment the economic manifestation of international hostilities. There has just begun in the United States a clamorous campaign for the denunciation of the Panama Treaty which places British ships on an equality with American. American ships must be exempt from the tolls. 'Don't we own the Canal?' ask the leaders of this campaign. There is widespread response to it. But of the millions of Americans who will become perhaps passionately angry over that matter and extremely anti-British, how many have any shares in any ships that can possibly benefit by the denunciation of the Treaty? Not one in a thousand. It is not an economic motive operating at all. Capitalism--the management of modern industry by a small economic autocracy of owners of private capital--has certainly a part in the conflicts that produce war. But that part does not arise from the direct interest that the capitalists of one nation as a whole have in the destruction of the trade or industry of another. Such a conclusion ignores the most elementary facts in the modern organisation of industry. And it is certainly not true to say that British capitalists, as a distinct group, were more disposed than the public as a whole to insist upon the Carthaginian features of the Treaty. Everything points rather to the exact contrary. Public opinion as reflected, for instance, by the December, 1918, election, was more ferociously anti-German than capitalists are likely to have been. It is certainly not too much to say that if the Treaty had been made by a group of British--or French--bankers, merchants, shipowners, insurance men, and industrialists, liberated from all fear of popular resentment, the economic life of Central Europe would not have been crushed as it has been. Assuredly, such a gathering of capitalists would have included groups having direct interest in the destruction of German competition. But it would also have included others having an interest in the restoration of the German market and German credit, and one influence would in some measure have cancelled the other. As a simple fact we know that not all British capitalists, still less British financiers, _are_ interested in the destruction of German prosperity. Central Europe was one of the very greatest markets available for British industry, and the recovery of that market may constitute for a very large number of manufacturers, merchants, shippers, insurance companies, and bankers, a source of immense potential profit. It is a perfectly arguable proposition, to put it at the very lowest, that British 'capitalism' has, as a whole, more to gain from a productive and stable Europe than from a starving and unstable one. There is no reason whatever to doubt the genuineness of the internationalism that we associate with the Manchester School of Capitalist Economics.