E— GEOGRAPHY 117 



great organisation, with agricultural, manufacturing, mining, financial and 

 commercial aspects of its life interwoven much more than in Britain. As 

 a result it often planned for years ahead, and redeveloped in modified 

 form the old idea of a trust to be handed on. 



If we think along these lines we see why, quite apart from wars and 

 questions of external political ambition on one side or the other, it has 

 come about that the French people have been gravely anxious. Here 

 are two enormously increased units, England and Germany, both 

 dependent on export trade, neither able to live with any reasonable 

 standard for the great multitude mainly on the produce of the national 

 soil ; both, before 1914, becoming able to lend abroad, both liable to 

 crises with the spread of industrialism to other lands, especially outside 

 Europe, and to the consequent checks to old lines in staple export trades. 

 France, urged, not very willingly, and to a smaller extent, along the same 

 lines for fear of being outclassed, could not but cherish the idea of the 

 peasant nation with external commerce as a secondary feature, and a 

 system that, at any rate, seemed to promise more continuity of economic 

 activities through the generations. There is thus a conflict between 

 different ideas of society underlying the present difficulties of Europe and 

 the world, and, naturally, nowhere is it so acute as it is between France 

 and Germany. It is well known that M. Clemenceau summed up the 

 problem of Europe by saying that there were too many millions of Germans 

 and British. He might have added ' and too few millions of tons of coal 

 in France.' His statement was less a callous gibe than an anxious thought, 

 fearful lest a society cherishing social continuity and economic stability 

 should be overwhelmed by one that had grown suddenly through an 

 expansion that was likely to receive a sharp check and must, therefore, 

 face a serious crisis, sooner or later, when more of the world's peoples 

 came to make things for themselves. 



The spread of large-scale industrialism to U.S.A. and Japan and the 

 prospect of its emergence elsewhere make the attendant problems still 

 more serious. There are now several states that have populations ex- 

 ceeding what their soils can support unless science intervenes afresh ; all 

 therefore compete for an increasingly precarious export trade, all are in 

 danger of finding groups of their people, with highly specialised machine- 

 tending activities and corresponding inelasticity of mind, suddenly 

 thrown out of employment and unable to adjust themselves to new lines 

 of enterprise. 



Meanwhile nearly half mankind, in the monsoon lands of Asia apart 

 from Japan, is being shaken out of its traditionalist schemes by contact 

 with the west, and nationalist ideas are germinating in various ways along- 

 side of schemes of industrial development that borrow from the west to 

 such an extent as to be a danger to indigenous society. Then the newer 

 lands which have received the later overflow of modern Europe, and which 

 seemed likely to become producers of raw material for Europe, are also 

 being forced along the same line of nationalist development. They have 

 borrowed freely from Europe (chiefly Britain and France) and more lately 

 from America, and have consequently found themselves faced with the 

 duty of finding large amounts of interest. This interest often, as already 



