BATTLE IX THE MUD 275

rupled her industrial output. Her whole economic structure-
strong and flourishing to outward appearance—depended on her
ability to secure rapidly expanding markets. The liabilities of
her producers, ever accelerating their pace, pursued her: she
could only keep ahead of bankruptcy by moving still faster.
The nemesis of capitalism came to her more quickly than to
any of her neighbours. It did so because she was more eager,
impatient and efficient. She positively flung herself at the
Gaderene precipice.

All the world was heading in the same direction. For follow-
ing England's example and hoping to equal her success, the
merchants of every larger nation in Europe had taken to manu-
facturing. Fostering their infant industries with state subsidies
and artificial systems of credit, they struggled feverishly to
undercut their rivals in foreign markets. The whole earth
became a vast field of exploitation ranged by the agents of the
more civilised peoples competing with one another for customers
and raw materials to feed the wheels of their growing factories
and the mouths of their fast-breeding factory populations. And
after their agents came consuls, warships and expeditionary
forces to establish spheres of influence. Envying England's vast
empire, the industrial Powers hastened to found empires of their
own in still unexploited territories whence they could procure
cheap raw materials and force their manufactures on natives
subject to their exclusive control. During the latter half of the
nineteenth century Germany, France, Italy and Belgium all
pounced on large areas of unclaimed land in Africa and the
Fax East. Holland and Portugal already possessed colonial
empires founded in an earlier age. Meanwhile the United States
and Russia each pursued a policy of unceasing continental ex-
pansion. Austria, backed by Germany, turned towards the
Balkans and the Middle East, and a new oriental manufacturing
Power, modelled on the most approved Western lines and sus-
tained by modern fleets and armies, fought two victorious wars
against China and Russia to establish a Japanese commercial
sphere of influence in Manchuria.

But the unclaimed areas of the earth available were not enough
to satisfy the cumulative and inexhaustible needs of the capitalist.
The faster the usurer—state or private—supplied the more
intelligent races with machinery, the vaster the territories and
populations needed to pay the interest on his capital and the