nations for an emergency commerce and
finance, or its rejection, will depend not only America's future place
in a world society but the structure of that world society in its
essential character.

For in each great nation of the world the same great choice, the same
great struggle of contending principles and policies, is taking place.
National self-dependence or internationalism--that is everywhere the
issue. It is true that in no European country can that issue be so
sharply presented as in America. For economic self-sufficiency in a
full sense and, therefore, political isolation, is not possible for any
European state. Even a peaceful and reviving Russia must lean upon her
more advanced neighbors for the economic essentials of capital and
organizing skill. But the several nations can strive to reduce their
interdependence and their national aid to the narrowest dimensions, and
where they cannot free themselves from extraneous alliances they can
restrict the area of economic dependence within a chosen circle.
Britain, for example, could set her policy closely and consistently to
make her world-wide empire into a self-sufficing system, and if, as is
likely, she learned that even the diversified fifth of the entire globe
which owns allegiance to her Crown could not satisfy all her wants, she
could eke out this inadequacy with some carefully selected and
purchased friendships.

This harking back to an economic nationalism is a natural reaction of
the war, and is fed by a dangerous and precarious peace. Fear, greed,
and suspicion prompt the victorious nations to guard their gains by
reverting to a close nationalism or a ringed alliance; humiliation,
without humility, the bitter pain of thwarted ambitions, resentment at
their punishment, dispose the vanquished nations to keep their own
company and form if possible, an economic system of their own. A
prolonged war, followed by a bad peace, may leave this indelible scar
upon the growing economic internationalism of the world.

The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms
which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious,
and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests.

Before the war internationalism was visibly advancing with every fresh
decade. The bonds of commercial and financial intercourse between the
peoples of different countries were continually woven closer; the
policy of self-sufficiency was continua