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which are degrading the labour they employ, and poisoning the industrial system upon which they are parasitic. We had better do without trades that can only survive in these low conditions.

This is, no doubt, a sound social position to take. But it is idle to deny that it might be a costly one, where the cases in question were not minor branches of domestic trades but large national industries. If there is a risk of the standards of wages and other costs of labour in our staple export manufactures being challenged successfully by the competition of cheap labour countries in the world-market whenever trade collapses, the only real remedy against the woeful dilemma of unemployment or low wages thus prescribed is a strengthening of the world-demand which prevents trade from collapsing. Only by regarding the industrial world as a single economic system, and treating it as such, can the problem of under-consumption and unemployment be tackled with success. To regard the national industry of such a country as ours, or, indeed, that of any advanced country, as a separate area of economic settlement is evidently an illusion. Economic peace and progress can only be attained by common rules of international conduct contributory to a more equal and more equitable apportionment of work and its product over the whole area of the world-market. However slow and difficult the road to this goal may be, it is the only road, and the sooner it is surveyed and opened for the common use of nations the better for the civilisation of the world.