156 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
country, because of all great countries Britain has grown to be the 
least self-sufficient, the most highly specialised, the most dependent 
on trade and peace and world-wide co-operation. A pregnant analogy 
will make the position clear. 
In Central Europe, before the War, lived, under one dynastic ruler, 
a congeries of communities known collectively as the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire. These communities formed together a single economic unit, 
a free-trade area with fifty million inhabitants, in which every stage of 
economic activity, from the simplest agriculture to the most developed 
finance, was strongly represented, in which all the separate functions 
came to be distributed locally according to economic advantage without 
regard to internal boundaries. Some regions—east and south—were 
predominantly agricultural ; in the north-west were extractive industries 
of coal and iron, and manufactures founded upon them; further south 
were other manufactures, and the main seat of commerce and finance. 
Here was timber; there water-power. Each industry tended to settle 
where it could most profitably be carried-on. Within each industry 
local specialisation often went very far; thus, in cotton, one region 
predominated in the first and final processes (spinning and bleaching), 
another had more than its share of intermediate processes (such as 
weaving); the locomotives for railways came to be built in one region 
and the waggons in another. In the centre lay Vienna, a natural 
meeting-point entrenched by art in a system of radiating railways, con- 
centrating on itself the most advanced stages of social life—fine manu- 
factures, commerce, distribution, transport, finance, administration— 
a large and prosperous head directing and nourished by a large body. 
While the Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted, this headship brought with 
it the first place in prosperity. The wealth, pleasure, and extrava- 
gance, no less than the government, education, science and art, of 
fifty millions made Vienna, their centre. 
The War came and went, and with it went the Empire. The 
dynastic ruler disappeared; the congeries dissolved; each community 
became a separate body desiring and needing a separate head, aiming at 
self-sufficiency, seeking it by economic barriers against intercourse. 
Tn that break-up the average prosperity of all the fifty millions has sunk. 
Nearly every region is in some way poorer than before. But no region 
has suffered as much as Vienna; in none does the loss take the 
characteristic appearance of over-population. Vienna remains a head 
srotesquely too large for the shrunken body of German Austria, mani- 
festly over-populated, as little able to support its former numbers at 
their former standard, as would be Monaco if the nations gave up 
gambling or Gibraltar if they gave up war. It is over-populated, not 
through exhaustion of its natural resources, not because in the past its 
people were too prolific, but because the world outside has changed 
too suddenly. 
De nobis fabula—the fate of German Austria is the moral for Britain. 
No other country of comparable size is so highly specialised as Britain. 
None produces so small a proportion of the food that it requires, or 
of the raw materials of its industries. None is so _ pre- 
dominantly engaged in the advanced ranges of economic activity; 
