prices and raising costs of production in the various industries to which these articles are indispensable. Within Great Britain, during the years of this deep general depression, tobacco, drink, and a few other luxury trades have taken an increasing toll of the reduced real income of the nation.
Our 'economic system' does not pretend to furnish any remedy for these grave injustices or to place the claims of the different trades to their share of the general income upon any equitable basis.
5. Finally, we encounter the wastes and injustices involved in the economic application of the principle of national sovereignty, the claim that each nation is the absolute owner and controller of all the economic resources, natural and human, within its domains. This economic nationalism assumes two shapes in modern times. The first is the attempt by trade regulations to conserve the economic resources of the country for the exclusive advantage of the existing inhabitants thereof, by restricting the entry of foreign competing goods and labour, or by the limitation of exports. Protective tariffs and immigration restriction are chief instruments of this economic nationalism. But the need of advanced industrial nations for large and secure access to backward countries with weaker populations, in order to obtain upon favourable terms the foods and raw materials they cannot grow at home, and adequate markets for their surplus manufactures, has expanded economic nationalism into economic imperialism. This policy is organically connected with
B
