ENGLISH SAGA

and interest, had become interdependent, a regrouping of its
provinces and people such as German aggression had rendered
necessary was only practicable if accompanied by a divorce
between national and economic sovereignty. Unrestricted
political independence for its diverse races was, however danger-
ous, possible: but unrestricted economic independence set laissez-
faire to operate in the conditions of a madhouse. For so long
as sovereignty carried with it the right to raise tariffs and trade
barriers along national frontiers, every transfer of industrial,
mineral or agricultural territory involved the dislocation of
existing industries and the unemployment and diminishing
purchasing power of those dependent on them. The annexation
of a province did not merely as in the past affront the pride of
a few crazy nationalists and militarists. Under capitalist laissez-
faire it entailed poverty and perhaps ruin on millions. It played
into the hands of the very warmongers the treaties were designed
to punish. For it offered for their discredited and antiquated
notions a vast and hungry audience.

Since the countries who shared the same continent with
industrial Germany were dependent for the sales of their primary
products on the purchasing power of the German workers, the
handicap imposed on her by anxious French statesmen created
economic disturbance everywhere. It unwittingly sentenced the
whole world to suffering. Already ruined by war and famine,
men in all countries found themselves without-former customers,
markets or employment. Everywhere governments seeking to
alleviate their sufferings and still their clamour w;ere driven
to create in a hurry new industries and markets to fill the hiatus.
Artificial and perilous economic creations arose like the great
armament industry of Czechoslovakia, cutting across the lines
of natural economic development and arousing needless rivalries
,and animosities. A great geographical area like the Danube basin,
which had formerly been an economic whole under the Haps-*
burgs, was cut up into unworkable trade-tight compart-
ments.

In a world so' anarchically devised that all nations were com-
petitors for markets beyond their borders, nothing but the
closest economic co-operation could have enabled their govern-
ments to safeguard the welfare of those for whom they were
responsible. So long as a nation was dependent for its markets,
credit and raw materials on forces outside its control, its people