and Germany, have ceased to produce sufficient food for their
maintenance, and have relied, instead, on the American, African and
Australian grain fields.[1]

In order to buy wheat, these countries must sell manufactured goods. In
order to manufacture, they are compelled to import the raw materials and
fuels--cotton, copper, rubber, petroleum, coal, iron. The countries with
highly developed industries have therefore ceased to be self-sufficient.
Their whole economic life has become a part and parcel of the life of
the world.

This world interdependence is reflected in the growth of world commerce
from a total value of 1,659 millions of dollars in 1820, 4,049 millions
in 1850, and 20,105 millions in 1900, to 75,311 millions in 1919.
Meanwhile, the nominal tonnage of steam and sailing vessels increased
from 5.8 millions of tons in 1820 to 12.3 millions of tons in 1850, to
20.5 millions in 1900, and to 32.2 millions in 1919.

Resources are sought after, raw materials are transported and
manufactured into usable products, manufactured products are exchanged
for food and raw materials, and the cycle is thus completed. In its
course, all of the principal countries and all of the continents are
drawn upon for the means of maintaining economic life.

While the industrial revolution broke the spell of isolation that lay so
heavily upon the remote parts of the world, the driving power of the
economic forces that followed in its wake, has battered down the
geographic barriers that separate men, almost to the vanishing point.
Peoples work together, exchange the products of their labor, travel,
accumulate and spread news, broadcast ideas and organize and co-ordinate
business ventures and labor unions, without any great consideration for
geography, and despite the political boundary lines that separate
nations. A century of rapid economic development has brought the world
into a physical unity the like of which it has never before experienced.

Through the ages, human brotherhood has been the theme of philosophers
and poets. Recent economic changes have established a world fellowship,
not, to be sure, of the kind about which utopists had dreamed, but one
growing out of the exigencies of world interdependence.

Tens of millions are to-day co-operating in production and exchange, not
because of any sweet reasonableness but because the pre-emptory demands
of existence leave them no choice. Of necessity, therefore, since they
are i