s, methods of keeping
their accounts; because the ship owner has been devising international
signal codes; the banker arranging conditions of international credit;
because, in fact, not merely a dozen but some hundreds of international
agreements, most of them made not between Governments at all, but
between groups and parties directly concerned, have been devised.

There is no overlord enforcing them, yet much of our daily life depends
upon their normal working. The bankers or the shipowners or the makers
of electric machinery have met in Paris or Brussels and decided that
such shall be the accepted code, such the universal measurement for the
lamp or instrument, such the conditions for the bill of exchange and
from the moment that there is an agreement you do not need any sanction.
If the instrument does not conform to the measurement it is unsalable
and that is sanction enough.

[Illustration: ANTONIO SALANDRA

Minister of the Interior and President of the Italian Ministry

_(Photo from Bain)_]

[Illustration: JAMES W. GERARD

American Ambassador to the German Empire]

We have seen in the preceding article that the dependence of the nations
goes back a good deal further than we are apt to think; that long before
the period of fully developed intercommunication, all nations owed
their civilization to foreigners. It was to their traffic with Gaul and
the visits of the Phoenician traders that the early inhabitants of the
British Isles learned their first steps in arts and crafts and the
development of a civilized society, and even in what we know as the Dark
Ages we find Charlemagne borrowing scholars from York to assist him in
civilizing the Continent.

The civilization which our forefathers brought with them to America was
the result of centuries of exchange in ideas between Britain and the
Continent, and though in the course of time it had become something
characteristically Anglo-Saxon, its origins were Greek and Arabic and
Roman and Jewish. But the interdependence of nations today is of an
infinitely more vital and insistent kind, and despite superficial
setbacks becomes more vital every day. As late as the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, for instance, Britain was still practically
self-sufficing; her very large foreign trade was a trade in luxuries.
She could still produce her own food, her population could still live on
her own soil.

But if today by some sort of magic Britain could kill off a