a
main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for
raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of
the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the
materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has
a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the
frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any
of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier,
Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of
the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-
populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of
the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is
the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery
that dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of
them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder
climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods.
But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies
of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The
inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of
slave