ft as its legacy smaller
international class wars in European countries. Remove from a nation
the economic supports it formerly received from other nations, markets
wherein to buy and sell, and you starve that nation; and starvation
breeds class war and anarchy. Can any one doubt this with the terrible
examples of Russia and Hungary before their eyes? But it is not a
matter of war conditions alone. Carry through a policy of economic
nationalism, under which all the large and well-equipped nations and
empires conserve for their exclusive uses the national resources they
command, and what happens? The smaller and the poorer nations, however
free in the political sense, become their economic bond slaves, at the
mercy of the master states for their foods and other necessaries of
life. Take the case of Austria under the new conditions, with a thick
population concentrated in a great political capital suddenly deprived
of all free access to its former sources of supply and the markets it
used to serve. For her it is a sentence of economic strangulation. Here
is an extreme instance of the effect of economic isolation on a weak
country. But the dangerous truth may be more broadly stated. A very few
great empires and nations today control the whole available supplies of
many of the foods, fabrics, and metals, the shipping and finance, that
are essential to the livelihood and progress of every civilized people.
Are Britain, America, France, and Japan--and especially the two
greatest of these powers--going to absorb or monopolize for their
exclusive purposes of trade or consumption these supplies which every
country needs, or are they going to let the rest of the world have fair
access to them? I think this to be upon the whole the most important of
the many urgent issues that confront us. For, if close nationalism or
imperialism should prevail, the weaker placed nations could not
acquiesce. Close economic nationalism is not for them a possibility.
They must win access to the world's supplies, peacefully if possible,
or else by force.

The fatality of the great choice is thus evident. Nations must and will
fight for the means of life. Close economic nationalism or imperialism
on the part of the great empires must, therefore, compel the restricted
countries to organize force for their economic liberation. This in turn
will compel the great empires to maintain strong military and naval
defences. It is impossible for the other nation