of labour among individuals cannot be overlooked altogether when the division of labour is applied to nations.

Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matter dramatically as follows:

The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization. It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling spectacle.'

'1

This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity of mankind if carried too far through the process of specialization. While admitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that the specialization process need go quite to that length. Even if England became one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it must work in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but it is all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley's eminence should call our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against. On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris's ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley. We might imagine England one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of which might be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruit trees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trained population would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest of their time in intellectual

1 England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century, by A. L. Bowley.

leisure and healthy exercise and home life under ideally happy conditions.

It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war.

War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them crippled because international exchange is interrupted. International trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown to depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present war should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that all nations will

aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries with which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unity through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in its narrower scope.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

A. L. Bowley, England's Foreign Trade. Swan Sonnenschein. C. K. Hobson, The Export of Capital. Constable.

W. S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

Smith's Wealth of Nations, chs. i-iv.

X

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL

LEGISLATION

We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classes within the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded by wilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably defined by the Roman Catholic Church as invincible. To say that unemployment in the mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affects the happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers and the great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depresses the national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughout the kingdom-to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorous while any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strata remains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentally undeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as a people, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many of us in these days to state truisms. Yet it is not so long ago. that facts which we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate, were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said 'Socialist' as Mr. Pecksniff said ' Pagan', had the temerity to point out, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was and could be no stronger than its weakest link. Even now, in the reaction, often only half conscious, of the employing class against any force which tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed from that on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike of

education, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace but breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of excitement, we can see how skindeep in many cases is the general belief in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually, we are all members one of another. And if the truth of our interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie otherwhere than on the surface, it is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That, doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does not regard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them he defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be suppressed as dangerous.

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