Still more extraordinary things came to light in the matter of the metal supply.  Under an individualistic system you may sell to the highest bidder, and anyone with money from anywhere may come in and buy.  Great supplies of colonial ores were found to be cornered by semi-national German syndicates.  Supplies were held up by these contracts against the necessities of the Empire.  And this was but one instance of many which have shown that, while industrial development in the Allied countries is still largely a squabbling confusion of little short-sighted, unscientific, private profit-seeking owners, in Germany it has been for some years increasingly run on far-seeing collectivist lines.  Against the comparatively little and mutually jealous British or American capitalists and millionaires Germany pits itself as a single great capitalist and competitor.  She has worked everywhere upon a comprehensive plan.  Against her great national electric combination, for example, only another national combination could stand.  As it was, Germany—­in the way of business—­wired and lit (and examined) the forts at Liege.  She bought and prepared a hundred strategic centres in individualistic Belgium and France.

So we pass from the fact that individualism is hopeless muddle to the fact that the individualist idea is one of limitless venality, Who can buy, may control.  And Germany, in her long scheming against her individualist rivals, has not simply set herself to buy and hold the keys and axles of their economic machinery.  She has set herself, it must be admitted, with a certain crudity and little success, but with unexampled vigour, to buy the minds of her adversaries.  The Western nations have taken a peculiar pride in having a free Press; that is to say, a Press that may be bought by anyone.  Our Press is constantly bought and sold, in gross and detail, by financiers, advertisers, political parties, and the like.  Germany came into the market rather noisily, and great papers do to a large extent live in glass houses; but her efforts have been sufficient to exercise the minds of great numbers of men with the problem of what might have happened in the way of national confusion if the German attack had been more subtly conceived....

It is only a partial answer to this difficulty to say that a country that is so nationalist and aggressive as Germany is incapable of subtle conceptions.  The fact remains that in Great Britain at the present time there are newspaper proprietors who would be good bargains for Germany at two million pounds a head, and that there was no effectual guarantee in the individualistic system, but only our good luck and the natural patriotism of the individuals concerned that she did not pick up these bargains before trading with the enemy became illegal.  It happened, for example, that Lord Northcliffe was public-spirited, That was the good luck of Great Britain rather than her merit.  There was nothing in the individualistic system to prevent Germany from buying up the entire Harmsworth Press—­The Times, Daily Mail, and all—­five years before the war, and using it to confuse the national mind, destroy the national unity, sacrifice the national interests, and frustrate the national will.