[Footnote 42: Cf. the many stories of beef and other rations being supplied to troops in such quantities that the units responsible for their consumption were obliged to bury them. These stories come mostly from Flanders. At home the same superabundance may have been the undoing of many a Quartermaster-Sergeant, who, not knowing what to do with such a plethora of beef, and having a proper superstition against throwing away good food, was tempted to sell it for about a penny a pound to the local butcher.] [Footnote 43: And the fact that they are doing so at the public expense is, of course, only an additional advantage to the traders who supply their needs; as they do not risk losing any of their money through bad debts.] Sec. 4 War stands to benefit Neutral as well as Belligerent Nations but not to the same extent In Western Europe at least all markets are practically open markets. No tariff however scientifically graduated will really divert the natural flow of trade to any considerable extent.[44] Consequently it might appear that all nations stand to benefit in the same way, but in varying degrees, from the intense local demand set up in the nation at war. Thus British Trade was exhorted in a sincerely rapacious article by Captain Dixon-Johnson[45] to snatch the opportunity presented by the Balkan War; and the unparalleled boom in American trade during the present war is another obvious example. This suggests at once that the benefit occasioned by war is not a national benefit, diffused vertically through every class of the belligerent nation; but a class benefit diffused as it were horizontally through the commercial strata of all nations within supplying distance of the centre of disturbance. On the other hand, of course, the immediate local demand is stronger than the demand communicated to remoter markets and more easily supplied; in other words the commercial class of the belligerent nation are more immediately and more intensely benefited by the state of war than the same classes of neighbouring nations, although in war as in peace the commercial classes of every nation are one.[46] Also the outbreak of war, even if it does not entirely sever a country from foreign sources of supply, is bound to cause a certain dislocation; if communications are not altogether interrupted they are more difficult and uncertain than in normal times; so that the trade of the belligerent country is always given a greater impetus than that of its neutral neighbours, and in such cases a particular industry which has been threatened by the competition of foreign imports may be actually rescued from extinction. Even the temporary dislocation of trade is a benefit to trade in the nation at war; for it enables existing stocks to be sold at exaggerated prices.[47] FOOTNOTES: