the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.[21] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 18: Cf. the present writer's introduction to Whyte-Melville's _Gladiators_ in _Everyman's Library_, 1911.] [Footnote 19: It was certainly, for example, the Headline Instinct which caused Mr. John Lane, a publisher of some repute, to impose on Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's novel _The Saddest Story_, one of the most remarkable novels of the century, such an absurdly irrelevant title as _The Good Soldier_. _The Good Soldier_ was published in April, 1915. The evidence that the publisher must have changed the title just before publication is that an instalment of it had appeared serially as _The Saddest Story_ in the summer of 1914, and that as _The Saddest Story_ it actually figured in Mr. John Lane's catalogue at the end of the book.] [Footnote 20: _Matyas Diak_ of Budapest.] Sec. 6 Trade in Time of Peace It would not however be correct to infer that the sacrifice of national welfare to commercial manoeuvres is a condition peculiar to war. Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require. And it is with all the selfishness of the artist that it performs its usual operations. Among all the unpublished detail of modern life hardly any class of facts is more disquieting than that of commercial procedure and achievement. The subject is too large to be reviewed in less than a volume; and I can do no more here than suggest a few instances that might be acquired by anyone who devotes his time to not reading the daily papers. The distribution and exchange of commodities are necessary to the existence of the State; so necessary that it might be supposed that their regulation would be one of the primary functions of government. Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity;[22] and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism. But trade in itself is a necessary aliment of the State, and its abuses ought not to be beyond remedy.