CHAPTER XVII 
THE NATION AND THE WORLD 
§ 1. We have examined the chief defects in the structure of a 
business and a trade, regarded in the light of instruments of 
human welfare, and we have considered some of the remedies, 
applied sometimes for purposes of distinctively industrial econ- 
omy, sometimes as devices of social therapeutics. 
There remains, however, one other mode of economic antag- 
onism deserving of consideration. Until modern times a nation 
was to all intents and purposes not only a political but an eco- 
nomic area, in the sense that almost all trade and other economic 
relations were confined within the national limit. The small 
dimensions of foreign, as compared with domestic trade, and 
the nature of that trade, confined to articles not produced at 
home, had little tendency to generate a feeling of international 
rivalry. Foreign trade was almost wholly complementary and 
not competitive. With the modern changes, which have altered 
this condition and made nations appear to be hostile competitors 
in world commerce, we are all familiar. The development of 
capitalist production to a common level and along similar lines 
in a number of Western nations, the tendency towards an in- 
crease of output of manufactured goods at a price exceeding the 
demands of the existing markets, the consequent invasion of the 
markets of each industrial country by the goods of other coun- 
tries, and the growing competition of the groups of traders in 
each nation to secure and develop new markets in the back- 
ward countries, with the assistance of the physical and military 
forces of their respective governments, have imposed upon the 
popular mind a powerful impression of economic opposition 
between nations. No falser and more disastrous delusion pre- 
vails in our time. The only facts which seem to give support to 
it are the Tariffs, Commercial Treaties and the occasional uses of 
political pressure and military force by States for the benefit of 
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