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inferior qualities of goods which may oust our superior qualities in periods of world impoverishment.

If we are to retain within our national area the volume of trade and employment needed to maintain our growing population upon a rising standard of life, we must come to some definite arrangements with other countries supplying the world-market to march along the same road of economic progress at something like the same pace. Unless we do this, an ever stronger tendency will operate to draw industries from this country and place them in countries where the net costs of production are lower.

It is a continuation of the same process which during our Industrial Revolution drew our scattered textile and other manufactures from rural districts into large towns situated near the new sources of power, or which now are beginning to decentralise some of these same industries so as to avail themselves of the cheaper land and labour of our villages. If it be found feasible to produce standard manufactures more cheaply in Russia, China or Japan, having regard to the joint economy of improved machine production and cheap labour, it seems inevitable that a good deal of our past industry will leave England and pass into these cheaper areas of production.

There may be some who will regard this process of transfer as not merely inevitable but desirable. Others may feel regret or even dismay at such a prospect, but still be sceptical about the feasibility of any economic internationalism competent to check it. But it is at any rate of vital importance that the disturbing prospect should be realised, and that friends