e increased quantity of capital which is unable to
find a safe remunerative investment nearer home, we are brought nearer
to a condition in which the whole surface of the world will be
disposed for industrial purposes by these same forces which have long
been confined in their direct and potent influence to a small portion
of Western Europe and America. This vast expansion of the area of
effective competition is beginning to specialise industry on the basis
of a world-market, which was formerly specialised on the more confined
basis of a national or provincial market. So in England, where the
early specialisation of machine-industry was but slightly affected by
outside competition, great changes are taking place. Portions of our
textile and metal industries, which naturally settled in districts of
Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Staffordshire, while the area of
competition was a national one,[118] seem likely to pass to India, to
Germany, or elsewhere, now that a tolerably free competition on the
basis of world-industry has set in. It is inevitable that with every
expansion of the area of competition under which a locality falls the
character of its specialisation will change. A piece of English ground
which was devoted to corn-growing when the market was a district one
centred in the county town, becomes the little factory town when
competition is established on a national basis; it may become the
pleasure-ground of a retired millionaire speculator if under the
pressure of world-competition it has been found that the manufacture
which now thrives there can be carried on more economically in Bombay
or Nankin, where each unit of labour power can be bought at the
cheapest rate, or where some slight saving in the transport of raw
material may be effected.

Sec. 10. The question how industry would be located, assuming the whole
surface of the globe was brought into a single market or area of
competition, with an equal development of transport facilities in all
its parts; or in other words, "What is the ideal disposition of
industry in a world-society making its chief end the attainment of
industrial wealth estimated at present values?" is one to which of
course no very exact answer can be given. But since this ideal
represents the goal of modern industrial progress, it is worth while
to call attention to the chief determinants of the localisation of
industries under free world-competition. The influences may be placed
in three