Democracy must make up its mind upon this point. It must turn a cold and critical eye upon all plausible talk about national prosperity and ask whether this prosperity is in fact the thing it professes to be. National wealth is so inequitably distributed that the production of wealth as a national concern is a polity _pour rire_. Protection and commercial imperialism are devices which work in the interests of the already prosperous classes, a very small minority of the community. This is not to say that there are not advocates of protective tariffs who sincerely believe all they say so fluently about “national” prosperity; of these good people it is not the disinterestedness that is to be called into question but the intelligence. But it as sure as anything can very well be that if a statutory limit were set upon profits, incomes and fortunes, we should hear very little about protective tariffs and the need of protecting commercial interests “_in partibus infidelibus_.” To say that this would immediately crush the incentive to the commercial and industrial enterprise of the nation would be an unworthy reflection upon the patriotism of those who are at present directing the enterprise. In any case the point which is coming up for the decision of democratic communities is whether they are going to identify themselves with, and commit themselves to, the support of enterprises which primarily serve the interests of a class already well enough provided for and which can bring no advantage to the people at large commensurate with the risk involved in endorsing them. With the crumbling of the dynastic tradition, the one substantial cause still outstanding of international misunderstanding is commercial rivalry; but this commercial rivalry is in no sense a rivalry between peoples; it is purely a rivalry between the capitalist interests in the different countries. Are the democracies still prepared to suffer arrest of their own development by retaining a sort of potential war-footing in the interests of what are after all mainly class-adventures?[45] Footnote 45: The proposal to establish an _International Labour Standard_ will, of course, do something to rob the protectionist argument of the force it borrows from playing up the “dumping” of goods produced by underpaid foreign labour.