MINERAL SUPPLIES BLISS. 269 



prominence made possible by her own acquisitions of iron and coal. 

 Nevertheless, in dealing with a situation that is obviously abnormal 

 it is not well to shut our eyee to the fact that a healthy and normal 

 condition of international industry will always be governed to a 

 large extent by the natural laws of supply and demand. To be 

 stable the international balance of power must be in approximate 

 equilibrium. Forewarned by the past, let us realize that in the 

 industrial struggle which is a necessary part of the great struggle 

 for existence no one can reach supremacy except by constant untiring 

 effort. We must prevent Germany from becoming the dominant 

 industrial market of the world, but the desired result should be 

 attained not so much by choking German industry at its sources as by 

 fostering and sustaining our own neglected industries until they reach 

 a point where they can successfully compete with Germany in her 

 own field. An outlaw nation in our midst will be a poor guarantee 

 of future harmony. Let us stifle the military despotism of Ger- 

 many, let us safeguard the revitalized industry of France, and let 

 us quicken the erstwhile sluggish industries of Great Britain, 

 then let us hope for a time when the great nations of the earth 

 may indeed represent a true partnership banded together for common 

 welfare. Wise men say that out of great wars come, along with de- 

 struction and devastation, great advantages to the human race. 

 To-day while we yet stand only in the faint glimmerings of the dawn, 

 it is hard to believe that out of evil comes good. Yet if the world 

 shall have been able to realize, not only the cruelty and barbarism 

 to which she refused to bow, but also the faults and short-sighted- 

 ness by which many nations are in some sense responsible for allow- 

 ing such a gigantic catastrophe to come to pass, and if each indi- 

 vidual nation shall come to realize that she owes both to herself 

 and to the world to fully develop her resources and her efficiency, 

 not selfishly in order that she may swell her own power to the 

 extermination of industrial development in other nations, but gen- 

 erously so that each nation may fulfil the share of human welfare 

 imposed upon her by Nature, then and then only will the Great War 

 bring forth lasting good to humanity. 



