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reduced the favourable margin enjoyed by the British manufacturer to vanishing 
point, the imminence of a price war caused serious changes in the whole economic 
outlook of our great exporting industries. The forces of competition depressed 
prices below a remunerative level, stifled enterprize and drove industry after 
industry into bankruptcy. The survival of the fittest may have a full scientific 
justification as long as something like equality or opportunity obtains, but it can 
scarcely be considered a sound doctrine when inequality of the most glaring type 
decides the grouping of forces. Protected by their tariffs, encouraged to form 
manufacturing associations and combinations to control the home market within 
the tariff-walls, and to enter, with no great fear of the results, into bitter competi- 
tion for markets outside of the home market, the German or American industrialist 
had great advantages compared with the British, and never failed to reap the 
consequences. 
Before the war, a number of industries in Britain had already gone out or were 
in a state of bankruptcy; the large gas-engine industry, the dye industry and 
many engineering branches had been almost stifled by concerted foreign com- 
petition, and the electrical industry itself was in a state verging on bankruptcy. 
The war came in time to avert a very serious crisis in many important industries, 
and probably prevented the collapse both of industrial production and, with it, 
the whole body of theory on which Free Trade had been based. The movement 
towards the large productive unit was strengthened enormously by war-time 
demands, and it was clear, even then, that the future of industry lay in the 
creation of organizations capable of interposing a strong resistance to foreign 
competition and of overcoming the internecine competition which had delivered 
industry, bound and helpless, into the hands of well-organized foreign competition. 
The German model, consciously or unconsciously, began to be adopted as the only 
real earnest of success. 
The movement towards the larger producers, or association of producers, 
which might take the form of trusts, combines or trade associations with consider- 
able executive powers as far as prices and manufacturing conditions were con- 
cerned, must be regarded as an inevitable development under modern conditions 
—in the direct line of evolution towards better economic and social conditions in 
the modern State. The mentality which rejoiced in the sacrifice of our great 
industries on the altar of low prices, low wages and a low standard of life, now 
finds little sympathy among those who have devoted study to the relations 
between industry and the State. A return to the conditions existing before the 
war, with unrestricted competition at home and abroad forcing industry down to 
a permanent starvation level, appears now unthinkable, Examination of the 
forces against which the electrical industry in this country has even now to struggle 
in its effort to maintain a sound position in export markets and avoid depression