But that is not all. The case of Russia alone has brought home to all
capable of realising an economic truth the fact that the economic
collapse of any large mass of population which had in the past entered
into the totality of international trade is a condition of proportional
impoverishment to all the others concerned. He who sees this as to
Russia cannot conceivably miss seeing it as to Germany; even tariffist
hallucinations about a "losing trade" under German tariffs cannot shut
out the fact that our trade with Russia and the United States was
carried on under still higher hostile tariffs. The unalterable fact
remains that industrial prosperity rises and falls in the measure of the
total mass of goods handled; and men who realise the responsibility of
all Governments for the material wellbeing of their populations can come
to only one conclusion. Trade must be facilitated all round for our own
sake.
Once more we come in sight of the truth that the industrial health of
every trading country depends on the industrial health of the rest--a
Free Trade truth that is perceptibly of more vital importance now than
ever before. It is in the exchange of commodities, and the extension of
consumption where that is required on a large scale, that the prosperity
of the industrial nations consists. And to say that, is to say that
until the trade exchanges of the world in general return to something
like the old footing, there cannot be a return of the old degree of
industrial wellbeing. Not that industrial wellbeing is to be secured by
the sole means of industrial re-expansion: the question of the need of
restriction of rate of increase of population is now being more and more
widely recognised as vital. But the present argument is limited to the
fiscal issue; and it must suffice merely to indicate the other as being
of the highest concurrent importance.
Adhering, then, to the fiscal issue, we reach the position that, just as
foreign trade has been a main source of British wealth in the past, and
particularly in the Free Trade era, the wealth consumed in the war is
recoverable only on the same lines. It is not merely that British
shipping--at present so lamentably paralysed and denuded of earning
power--cannot be restored to prosperity without a large resumption of
international exchanges: a large proportion of industrial employment
unalterably depends upon that resumption. And it is wholly impossible to
return to pre-war levels of employment by any plan of penalising
imports.