Under that system it did not matter much, economically, what political administration--provided always that it was an orderly one--covered the area in which raw materials were found, or even controlled ports and access to the sea. It was in no way indispensable to British industry that its most necessary raw material--cotton, say--should be under its own control. That industry had developed while the sources of the material were in a foreign State. Lancashire did not need to 'own' Louisiana. If England had 'owned' Louisiana, British cotton-spinners would still have had to pay for the cotton as before. When a writer declared before the War that Germany dreamed of the conquest of Canada because she needed its wheat wherewith to feed her people, he certainly overlooked the fact that Germany could have had the wheat of Canada on the same conditions as the British who 'owned' the country--and who certainly could not get it without paying for it. It was true before the War to write:-- 'Co-operation between nations has become essential for the very life of their peoples. But that co-operation does not take place as between States at all. A trading corporation called "Britain" does not buy cotton from another corporation called "America." A manufacturer in Manchester strikes a bargain with a merchant in Louisiana in order to keep a bargain with a dyer in Germany, and three, or a much larger number of parties, enter into virtual, or perhaps actual, contract, and form a mutually dependent economic community (numbering, it may be, with the work-people in the group of industries involved, some millions of individuals)--an economic entity so far as one can exist which does not include all organised society. The special interests of such a community may become hostile to those of another community, but it will almost certainly not be a "national" one, but one of a like nature, say a shipping ring or groups of international bankers or Stock Exchange speculators. The frontiers of such communities do not coincide with the areas in which operate the functions of the State. How could a State, say Britain, act on behalf of an economic entity such as that just indicated? By pressure against America or Germany? But the community against which the British manufacturer in this case wants pressure exercised is not "America" or "Germany"--both want it exercised against the shipping ring or the speculators or the bankers who in part are British. If Britain injures America or Germany as a whole, she injures necessarily the economic entity which it was her object to protect.'[19]