THE NATION AND THE WORLD 3 
financiers, investors, traders or settlers belonging to their na- 
tionality. This intervention of Governments for the supposed 
advantage of their citizens has had the unfortunate effect of 
presenting nations in the wholly false position of rival business 
firms. Groups of private manufacturers, traders and financiers, 
using their government to secure their private profitable ends, 
have thus produced grave conflicts of international policy. The 
worst instrument of this antagonism, because the most obvious 
and the most vexatious, is the protective Tariff, and the most 
singular proof of its derationalising efficacy is found in the con- 
duct of our recent fiscal controversy. The fiercest fight in all 
that controversy has raged round the relative size, growth and 
profitable character of the foreign trade of Great Britain, Ger- 
many, America, etc. These States are actually treated, not 
merely by Protectionists but by many Free Traders, as if they 
were great trading firms, engaged in struggling against one 
another for the exclusive possession of some limited economic 
territory, the success of one being attended by a loss to the 
others. Now, Great Britain, Germany and America are not 
economic entities at all; they are not engaged in world commerce, 
either as competitors or as cogperators; the respective advances 
or declines made by certain groups of merchants within their 
confines in overseas trade have no net national significance at all. 
Finally, overseas trade, by itself, furnishes no index of the collect- 
ive prosperity of each nation. 
§ 2. The whole presentation of the case under the head of 
Nations is irrelevant and deceptive, conveying, as it is designed 
to do, the false suggestion that Englishmen, grouped together 
as a people, are somehow competing with Germans grouped 
together as another nation, and Americans as a third nation. 
Now no such collective competition exists at all. So far as trade 
involves competition, that competition takes place, not between 
nations, but between trading firms, and it is much keener and 
more persistent between trading firms belonging to the same 
nation than between those belonging to different nations. Bir- 
mingham or Sheffield firms compete with one another for machin- 
ery and metal contracts far more fiercely than they compete with 
Germans or Americans in the same trade, and so it is in every 
Ir