doing: politicians, as you well know, take good care to shut their
eyes to everything that may happen six months ahead; but what is
being done is this: that the present system, which always must
include national rivalry, is pushing us into a desperate scramble for
the markets on more or less equal terms with other nations, because,
once more, we have lost that command of them which we once had.
Desperate is not too strong a word. We shall let this impulse to
snatch markets carry us whither it will, whither it must. To-day it
is successful burglary and disgrace, to-morrow it may be mere defeat
and disgrace.

Now this is not a digression, although in saying this I am nearer to
what is generally called politics than I shall be again. I only want
to show you what commercial war comes to when it has to do with
foreign nations, and that even the dullest can see how mere waste
must go with it. That is how we live now with foreign nations,
prepared to ruin them without war if possible, with it if necessary,
let alone meantime the disgraceful exploiting of savage tribes and
barbarous peoples, on whom we force at once our shoddy wares and our
hypocrisy at the cannon's mouth.

Well, surely Socialism can offer you something in the place of all
that. It can; it can offer you peace and friendship instead of war.
We might live utterly without national rivalries, acknowledging that
while it is best for those who feel that they naturally form a
community under one name to govern themselves, yet that no community
in civilization should feel that it had interests opposed any other,
their economical condition being at any rate similar; so that any
citizen of one community could fall to work and live without
disturbance of his life when he was in a foreign country, and would