reign commerce
was insignificant, the population was limited by the food it could
produce. Every increase in the number of Englishmen meant recourse to
less fertile fields, an increase in rents, a lowering of wages and a
resultant pauperism. The hideous distress during the Napoleonic Wars
and after was largely due to an excessive population striving to live
upon narrow agricultural resources.

The alternative presented was to stop bearing children or find food
abroad; stagnation or industrialism. If England (with Wales) could in
1821 barely support twelve millions, how could she maintain thirty-six
millions in 1911? Only by going over to free trade, by raising her
food and raw materials in countries where land was cheap, and employing
her people in converting these into finished products. To-day three
live in England better than one lived before; on the other hand, a
large part of the food supply is raised abroad.

Had Great Britain literally become "the workshop of the world,"
manufacturing for sixteen hundred million inhabitants, there would have
been no limit to her possible increase in population. No such national
monopoly, however, was possible, or from a world point of view
desirable. Belgium, France, Germany and later other thickly populated
countries were also faced with the choice between stagnation and
industrialism, and as English machines, English industrial methods and
English factory organisation could be imported, these nations, one
after another, went over to manufacturing, ceased to export food and
{80} began to import both food and raw materials, competing with Great
Britain for industrial supremacy.

These competing industrial nations had a great common interest, to
increase the total food and raw materials to be bought and therefore
the manufactured products to be sold. The greater the development of
foreign agriculture the better for industry in all these nations. To
secure this agricultural base abroad, the nation was not compelled to
establish its own colonies, for Belgium and Holland could buy food and
raw materials even if the Congo and Java were nonexistent. As a
consumer it made little difference to England whether she got her wheat
from Russia or India, or her sugar from Germany or Mauritius, so long
as the supply was plentiful, cheap and constant. Actually a large part
of the food supply came from politically independent countries, the
United States alone increasing its food ex