24 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
continuing and increasing excess of material wealth. Commerce will still increase in volume, but speculation will be restricted from lack of opportunity and scarcity of victims.
The exercise of collective power to secure opportunity for profitable production will become more and more imperative. The capacity for overproduction in all lines of industry still exists with regard to the world's limit for consumption; its restricted application has not yet become universal. Not every country can supply all its own wants. The struggle of the immediate future will be between nations, to secure the chance to interchange their surplus in a manner most advantageous to their own producers. Unrestricted "free-trade" would result in subjecting the labor of each country to the competition of all the others. Restricted areas and nationalities whose needs are complementary of each other must combine together for mutual advantage. Mr. Elaine's beautiful dream of reciprocal relations between the United States and the Central and South American Republics was unquestionably born of a half-unconscious percep- tion of what the new conditions will demand. Mr. Chamberlain's masterly argument for the commercial and industrial consolida- tion of the British Empire originates in his clear appreciation of this overwhelming necessity ; the interests of all parts of the Empire, for the first time in her history perhaps, require free- trade with the colonies and strict protection against all outside competitors. Holding more than half the undeveloped resources of the globe, and aided by her unparalleled resources of accu- mulated capital, Great Britain will for a time at least, protect herself from the effects of the general overproduction.
Protection for the home-market, more intimate commercial alliance with nations whose needs are complementary in charac- ter with ours, restriction of production, the diversion of labor to fields of employment not immediately productive and which minister to the public and personal enjoyment rather than material gain, likewise offer to us the natural and reasonable methods of adjusting our own industrial relations to these new inevitable conditions. ALBION W. TOURGEE.
MAYVILLE, N. Y.
