Note 120 — Chapter IV · ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE

‘We need markets. What is a market? “A place where things are sold.” That is only half the truth. It is a place where things are bought and sold, and one operation is impossible without the other, and the notion that one nation can sell for ever and never buy is simply the theory of perpetual motion applied to economics; and international trade can no more be based upon perpetual motion than can engineering. As between economically highly-organised nations a customer must also be a competitor, a fact which bayonets cannot alter. To the extent to which they destroy him as a competitor, they destroy him, speaking generally and largely, as a customer.... This is the paradox, the futility of conquest—the great illusion which the history of our own empire so well illustrates. We “own” our empire by allowing its component parts to develop themselves in their own way, and in view of their own ends, and all the empires which have pursued any other policy have only ended by impoverishing their own populations and falling to pieces.’ (p. 75).