The economic argument, then, that it pays best to make and grow things
where they can best be made and grown remains just as true as ever it
was, but it has been complicated by a political objection that if one
happens to go to war with a nation that has supplied raw material, or
half-raw material, for industries that are essential to our commercial
if not to our actual existence, the good profits made in time of peace
are likely to be wiped out, or worse, by the extent of the inconvenience
and paralysis that this dependence brings with it in time of war
The economic argument, then, that it pays best to make and grow things
where they can best be made and grown remains just as true as ever it
was, but it has been complicated by a political objection that if one
happens to go to war with a nation that has supplied raw material, or
half-raw material, for industries that are essential to our commercial
if not to our actual existence, the good profits made in time of peace
are likely to be wiped out, or worse, by the extent of the inconvenience
and paralysis that this dependence brings with it in time of war. And
even if we are not at war with our providers, the greater danger and
cost of carriage by sea, when war is afoot, makes us question the
advantage of the process, for example, by which we have developed a
foreign dairying industry with our capital, and learnt to depend on it
for a large part of our supply of eggs and butter, while at home we have
seen a great magnate lay waste farms in order to make fruitful land into
a wilderness for himself and his deer. It may have paid us to let this
be done if we were sure of peace, but now that we have seen what modern
warfare means, when it breaks out on a big scale, we may surely begin to
think that people who make bracken grow in place of wheat, in order to
improve what auctioneers call the amenities of their rural residences,
are putting their personal gratification first in a question which is of
national importance.
