der ceremonial phrases in days of peace but
breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of
excitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general belief
in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually,
we are all members one of another. And if the truth of our
interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly,
because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it
is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international,
resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the
web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost
corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the
consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot
escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That,
doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little
interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does not
regard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them he
defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be
dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be
suppressed as dangerous.

The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependence
of countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on the
journalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning,
but it was light of the crudest kind. The result of the illumination, in
numerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflect
with astonishment on the number of things which this country is in the
habit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her folly
in not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficiently
high, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need the
enemy's products, they would never buy any of them again. To do them
justice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actual
difficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which the
source had suddenly dried up. Those who sat in factory offices ruefully
contemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium,
and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not,
even while they set about inventing something that should replace this
contribution, belittle what they had lost. They knew, and said, that
while they were