Page:International Trade, An Application of Economic Theory.djvu/23

 mal importance of the more primitive industrial arts in the life of a few Western nations cannot last. If then it is true that under the recent abnormal circumstances the proportion of the real wealth of such countries as Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, which is suitable for external trade, is diminishing, this diminution will be still greater when the backward countries have learned, as they are learning, to manufacture for themselves. This tendency, as will appear when we consider the nature of international exchange, by no means makes for the disappearance of external trade and the establishment of self-sufficing nations. As industrial civilisation advances, the number, the volume, the value of trades with foreign nations must increase for every civilised nation, but not so fast as the number, the volume, and the values of the internal industry concerned with satisfying wants which are constantly becoming more refined and more largely non-material in their forms.

At the present time it is estimated that between one-fifth and one-sixth of the wage-earners in Great Britain are putting their labour-power into goods for external markets. Since the aggregate income of the working classes (as of the entire nation) is growing far faster than the value of our export trade, it is certain that the proportion of workers who made goods for export was far larger a generation ago, and