ts have long been
overtaken. The accelerated consumption could only be maintained by the
discovery of new markets, which was undertaken by means of the political
catch-words of Imperialism and Colonial Expansion;[41] or else by the
wholesale destruction of existing supplies. As the number of new markets
and their capacity for consuming things they don't want is ultimately
just as limited as the number and capacity of home markets (for
obviously the time must come when all the Chinamen and Koutso-Vlachs and
South Sea Islanders have already been supplied with ready-made brown
boots and tinned salmon), only one method remained by which Commerce and
Industry might escape, or at least postpone, the penalty of half a
century of over-production. This was by the partial destruction of the
world's existing supplies. If this could be arranged, there might be a
genuine demand for them to be replaced.

Sec. 3

War a form of Destruction

Now as a form of destruction war is easily first. Quite apart from the
obvious destruction of commodities that takes place when a country is
ravaged and invaded, as in the case of Belgium and Northern France, it
should be remembered that the methods of supplying an army in the field
involve the sheer waste or destruction of very nearly half the food and
equipment provided.[42] This is not necessarily the result, as might be
expected, of official incompetence. It may on the contrary be the result
of official foresight, which must allow in warfare for all the changes
and chances of communication, and knows that it is better to waste a
million tons of beef than to risk the starvation of a single regiment.
Such waste, in other words, is a condition of warfare. Add to this the
preventive destruction of stores and baggage which takes place whenever
troops are compelled to retreat: in this way about a million pounds'
worth of stores were carefully burned before the evacuation of
Gallipoli; and not a hundred yards of trench is ever abandoned without
the jettison of about a hundred pounds' worth of equipment. Add to this
the fact that every shot fired, from the mere rifle bullet to the
largest shell, does a proportionate amount of material damage when it
finds its billet: the bursting of a six-inch shell will do, I suppose,
on an average, as much damage in half a second as an ordinary fire can
do in twenty-four hours. Add to this again the fact that the very force
which propels every bullet and every sh