The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependence of countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on the journalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning, but it was light of the crudest kind. The result of the illumination, in numerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflect with astonishment on the number of things which this country is in the habit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her folly in not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficiently high, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need the enemy's products, they would never buy any of them again. To do them justice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actual difficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which the source had suddenly dried up. Those who sat in factory offices ruefully contemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium, and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not, even while they set about inventing something that should replace this contribution, belittle what they had lost. They knew, and said, that while they were confident of producing a working substitute, they did not pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed to be the special gift of the German, or Belgian, or Austrian trader. Perhaps it was not after all only sheer laziness on the part of the British manufacturer, and sheer lack of patriotism on the part of British governments which induced our commercial leaders to concentrate on one field of production and abandon another. To each nation, as to each man, his gift. Some realization of this law may have come instinctively to practical workers engaged in practical tasks.