Segar. — The Struggle for Foreign Trade. 531 



the race for wealth and population 1 They will be supplying 

 food and raw material for manufacture to these others. The 

 welfare of the people need not necessarily suffer on that account, 

 as it certainly does not at the present time. Only if it be 

 thought essential for the nation to grow out of an agricultural 

 state and achieve eminence in manufactures, thus increasing 

 in population and aggregate wealth to an extent that would 

 not be otherwise possible, need the prospects of this time be 

 contemplated with any anxiety. It is true we have previously 

 spoken of the growth that has been achieved in some cases, 

 and is likely soon to be achieved in others, as the result of 

 developing manufactures for export, as of a phenomenon by 

 no means remarkable, but the natural result of present con- 

 ditions. But in the days to which we refer, when so vast a 

 proportion of the world's population will be living on land 

 totally inadequate to providing them with the necessary food 

 and raw material, and will be exporting manufactures for the 

 food and raw materials of the remainder, the world will move 

 more slowly. England, the first nation to attain to great manu- 

 facturing pre-eminence, was able to feed her people from the 

 new world and pay with her manufactures. Germany, coming 

 next, found the world wanting more manufactures than Eng- 

 land could supply, and found it easy to follow in her footsteps. 

 But no such easy path can lie before Canada, Australia, Argen- 

 tina, or New Zealand. Even when these countries reach the 

 stage when their further development will require the exporting 

 of manufactures for food and raw material, there will no doubt 

 be then, as probably always, parts of the earth whose want 

 of power, climate, and other circumstances will prevent their 

 ever assuming the manufacturing state. Such parts must 

 export food and raw materials ; but these exports will be 

 required by the nations that will then have become the great 

 manufacturing nations. New Zealand and the other countries 

 at about the same stage of development will have to compete 

 with these in the effort to change themselves from agricul- 

 tural to manufacturing nations. If it be still possible for any 

 of these younger nations to urge forward and attain the manu- 

 facturing state, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, with their 

 greater populations and greater resources, will grasp what oppor- 

 tunities there are. States of the magnitude of New Zealand 

 will have small chance. International competition will be very 

 different from what it is to-day. The more backward nations 

 will only be able to come to the front at the expense of the 

 more highly developed. Every nation cannot export manufac- 

 tures in return for food and raw materials to maintain a popula- 

 tion greatly in excess of what could live on her own produce. 



