ll foreigners
the means of livelihood for quite an appreciable portion of her
population would have disappeared. Millions would be threatened by
actual starvation. For Britain's overseas trade, on which so large a
proportion of the population actually lives, is mainly with the outside
world and not with her own empire. We have seen what isolation merely
from two countries has meant for Great Britain. Britain is still
maintaining her contacts with the world as a whole, but the cessation of
relationship with two countries has precipitated the gravest financial
crisis known in all her history, has kept her Stock Exchanges closed for
months, has sent her Consols to a lower point than any known since the
worst period of the Napoleonic wars, and has compelled the Government
ruthlessly to pledge its credit for the support of banking institutions
and all the various trades that have been most seriously hit.

Nor is Germany's isolation altogether complete. She manages through
neutral countries and otherwise to maintain a considerable current of
relationship with the outside world, but how deeply and disastrously the
partial severance of contact has affected Germany we shall not at
present, probably at no time, in full measure know.

All this gives a mere hint of what the organized isolation by the entire
world would mean to any one nation. Imagine the position of a civilized
country whose ports no ship from another country would enter, whose
bills no banker would discount, a country unable to receive a telegram
or a letter from the outside world or send one thereto, whose citizens
could neither travel in other countries or maintain communications
therewith. It would have an effect in the modern world somewhat
equivalent to that of the dreadful edicts of excommunication and
interdict which the papal power was able to issue in the mediaeval
world.

I am aware, of course, that such a measure would fall very hardly upon
certain individuals in the countries inflicting this punishment, but it
is quite within the power of the Governments of those countries to do
what the British Government has done in the case of persons like
acceptors of German bills who found themselves threatened with
bankruptcy and who threatened in consequence to create great disturbance
around them because of the impossibility of securing payment from the
German indorsers. The British Government came to the rescue of those
acceptors, used the whole national cr