id not literally starve. In 1913 the United
Kingdom spent $1,400,000,000 on imported foods, drink and tobacco, and
for this, as for her importation of raw materials, she must pay. While
our export of manufactures still forms but a trifling part (perhaps one
thirtieth) of our total product, the British and the German export
constitutes an immensely larger proportion. Our export of finished
wares, despite its rapid increase, was in 1914 only some seven dollars
per capita, while that of the United Kingdom was about forty-five
dollars per capita.[1] It will therefore not be wondered at if our
increasing export of manufactures both to Europe and to the countries
to which Europe exports, causes us to be involved, as we have not been
for over a century, in the ambitions, conflicts and life-interests of
the great European nations.

For at bottom a commercial war is an industrial war, a struggle for
national prosperity. If, for example, Germany fails to hold her
foreign markets, she must shut down factories. Her industrial problem
is to buy raw materials from abroad cheap, ship to Germany, manufacture
into finished products, transport to a country {61} willing to buy, and
from this enterprise secure profits enough to purchase food for her
people. If she is beaten out, let us say, in the export cotton
industry she must turn to something else. She may try to save the
industry by increasing efficiency or reducing wages, but if she fails,
she must close up some of her mills. If she cannot employ the growing
masses who depend upon export industries, she must let her surplus
people--and with them a part of her capital--emigrate. Like other
European countries she has learned this lesson by experience. Thus it
often happened when America increased her tariff rates that European
factories, unable to compete, migrated, men and capital, to this
country. It is true that the world market constantly expands, but the
producing capacity of the manufacturing nations also increases, and
competition becomes ever more severe. The more rapidly America invades
the markets which Europe has hitherto held, the more she squeezes them,
the more bitter the feeling against her will become.

That bitterness of feeling (in the conditions preceding the present
war) was more likely to arise in Germany than in England and more
likely in England than in France. We have spoken of these as rival
nations, but there are intensities of rivalry varying i