e in her insularity--at once her defence and her
undoing--she became infected with the virus of content. Her steel was
the best steel; her wares led all the rest. "Take it or leave it!" was
her selling maxim. When devices came along that saved labour and
increased production she refused to scrap the old to make way for the
new. Born, too, was the evil of restricted output. Moss began to grow on
her vaunted industrial structure. England lagged in the trade
procession.

But as she lagged the assimilative German streamed in through her
hospitable door. He served his apprenticeship in British mills; took
home the secrets and methods of British art and craft. He geared them to
cheap labour, harnessed product to masterful distribution, and became a
World Power. Before long he had annexed the dye trade; was competing
with British steel; was making once-cherished British goods.

What the German did in England he duplicated elsewhere. The world of
ideas was his field and, with insatiate hunger, he garnered them in. He
cunningly acquired the sources of raw supply, especially the essentials
to national defence; for he overlooked nothing. All was grist to his
mills. He pitched his tents upon debatable trade lands. His rivals
called it economic penetration, because he invariably took root. For him
it was merely good business.

Then England suddenly realised that Germany had left her behind in the
race for international commerce. Indifference lay at the root of this
backsliding. It was easier and cheaper to buy the German-made product
and reship it than to produce the same article at home. Sloth hung like
a chain on English energy. What did it matter? No forest of bayonets
hemmed her in; she was still Mistress of the Seas.

Meantime Germany dripped with efficiency and ached with expansion. Her
amazing teamwork between state and business, stimulated by an interested
finance, drove her on to a place in the sun. The shadows seemed far away
when the great war crashed into civilisation. Then England woke to the
folly of her blindness. The mystery of coal-tar products was shut up in
a German laboratory; the secrets of tungsten, necessary to the toughest
steel, were imprisoned in a Teutonic mill; and so on down a long list of
products vital to industry and defence.

Even those early and tragic reverses of the war did not stir the stolid
British bulk. Men fought for a chance to fight; restriction still
oppressed factory output. Red tape