Still another lesson from the war that America must learn is that food
supplies are now not national, but international. We have seen the
price of sugar in the United States jumping up and down in a commercial
battle between England and Germany almost before their clash at arms.

Before the war, 80 per cent of the sugar consumed in England was
produced in Germany. England, under her free trade policy, had
permitted German beet sugar interests, fattened upon a government
bounty, to destroy the refinery interests in the south of England. The
Island gained by the trade because her refineries were turned into
sugar canneries. Jams and marmalades therefrom expanded her foreign
trade. Germany, however, at the outbreak of this war, proposed to cut
off, or tax heavily, England's sugar supply. Into the markets of the
world went the British Treasury and in a few days the government was in
command of an eighteen months' supply of sugar for the whole of Great
Britain. Down went the price of sugar in Germany, and now the
government is taking measures to restore prosperity to her sugar
interests by a reduction in beet-sugar plantings. The English
government is selling sugar in England at a loss, as a war measure, and
will not permit sugar purchases in any country where Germany sells her
sugar.

Nothing but the strain of war could have induced the Bank of England to
count a hundred million dollars in gold sent from New York into Canada
as a part of the Bank's metal reserve.

There is now no reason why this relation should not continue. Why
should fifty or a hundred million in gold be sent across the ocean in
the spring, to be returned in the fall? The world is going to be still
more a unit in finance hereafter. It has taken a generation to educate