These great companies especially promote the patriotism of Great Britain, but they are controlled by no narrow nativism. Under other flags the same people develop the same noble sentiments. These British corporations, individually or coöperating, maintain three ship building companies in Canada: hence the recent movement for a Canadian navy, to be built in Canadian Yards. They have five tentacles or subsidiary companies in Italy, (Pozzuoli, Ansaldo, Odero, Terni, and Orlando), one in Spain (Ferrol), one in Portugal, and one in Japan. "Time was when Englishmen bled for Portugal; now our old-time ally must bleed for us." The relations of these British trusts with similar groups in other countries are most close and friendly. In the "Harvey United Steel Company" (wound up in 1911), we find them in international combination with the Bethlehem Steel Plant in Pennsylvania, the Creusot company in France, and the Essen and Dillingen concerns in Germany, with a similar international combination of supporting banks. "In forty years," observes Perris, "all the Peace Societies have not succeeded in effecting such a Franco-German reconciliation as this. In the share list (of this company) Mr. Newbold found the names of one British general and two major generals, and behind these were the shadowy figures of a vast host of princes, peers, ministers of the Crown, soldiers, sailors and clerics. A veritable Brotherhood in Arms! I cannot believe that the Harvey United Steel Company is really dead. Somewhere it surely has had a glorious resurrection! Under some metamorphoses it lives and works to prove the pettiness of national prejudice and the ease of forgetting such sores as Alsace-Lorraine, when men have learned the golden wisdom of 'good business.'"
A needed accessory of such good business is a series of commercial agents, "the strong silent men," who frequent every court of Europe. Incidental to their work of making sales, is to _create_ a market. This is done by means of the recurrent war scares. A third element of importance is the reiteration of the constant fact that only the latest inventions can serve in war, and that all former purchases should be "scrapped" as rapidly as possible. Were it not for the scrapping process, the world's market for implements of destruction would be speedily glutted. The machinery of war has reached such marvelous perfection and such an acme of cost that the work of a day may bankrupt a whole nation. The issue of a campaign may be decided by the control of a single murderous invention. Thus science has been called into the service of war, to a degree that inspires the hope that, by carrying its risks to madness, it makes war virtually impossible. But meanwhile the expenses go on.