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