Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/132

 will naturally tend to grow greater and greater. “In the next war there will be no neutrals,” some say; almost certainly, in the next European war. Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Greece, will be afraid, remembering Belgium, to remain out of alliances. Indeed, Belgium has pointed the way. A recognized neutral up to the Great War, she has renounced the principle of neutrality, and allied herself with France. Probably the great European powers will draw in the Orient actively—Japan’s part, China’s part in the late war were merely passive. For the world-machine tends to become ever more complex, and nations ever more interdependent. The swift airship is here; if a man is eleven times nearer any given point than he was in 1814, soon he will be twenty times nearer.

Can we stay out of the next general war? We could not stay out of the last. We are passing from a stage where we depended for foreign trade mainly on raw materials, whose sale does not need to be “pushed,” to the industrial stage. Increasingly, our exports will consist of manufactured goods. Foreign markets will be to us not dumping-grounds for short seasons of overproduction but real factors in our national prosperity. And foreign markets for manufactured goods need cultivation, even forcing. With our unrivalled wealth, we shall store up surplus capital, which will find more attractive returns in undeveloped regions at home. That is happening already. Since the war, hundreds of millions,