equipment will survive, and only enough of that to satisfy the natural
demand for goods. All the rest must be abandoned because there will
be no profit in working it. Well, it remains to be seen if people
will abandon their machines without a struggle, purely for rational
reasons. Much more is it likely that the higher cost of working the
less efficient equipment will be compensated by a lower wage-rate,
unemployment being the workers’ alternative. Moreover, if all the
inefficient and unnecessary machines were scrapped that would mean only
postponement of the sequel. The competition would begin all over again.
There are those who suggest that we are facing toward the mercantile
system of the Middle Ages, when it was the custom for each nation
jealously to protect its home-market from the competitive handicrafts
of other nations, and to prohibit or punitively tax the exportation
of raw material to rival countries. So we are. To say it is merely to
indicate the rock upon which, if nothing happens, the ship of trade is
bound to wreck herself.
A growing light on the actions of trade as it is organized by the
industrial powers now impels nations hitherto agricultural to found
industries of their own. As producers of foodstuffs and raw materials
to be exchanged for machine-products they came to have a sense of
being exploited. In academic theory this was an exchange by which the
industrial nation satisfied its food wants and the agricultural nation
its industrial wants, to mutual advantage. But how came the industrial
nation also to acquire wealth by the transaction? Performing the
preferred industrial task, it got not only its food but a profit over.
What else could it mean but that after a series of years the industrial
nation should come to have large interest-bearing investments in the
agricultural country, owning its railroads, tramways, water works, and
banks? What else could it mean but that the richest country in foreign
investments was the one that had been for the longest time engaged in
exchanging the surplus product of its machines for the food and raw
materials of other countries? How was it that those other countries,
after having served her for many years with food and raw materials,
invariably owed her a great deal of money? Or, if you approach it
from the other point of view, you find in the economic literature of
industrial nations a certain finished doctrine, which is that the
exchange of manufactured goods for food and raw materials is a business
that pays. It is not primarily a vital transaction. It becomes vital
by extension—that is to say, when in the course of time the industrial
population has increased beyond the native food supply. But in the
beginning the motive is gain. Nakedly, it is an exchange of skilled
labour for unskilled labour, to the enrichment of the former; it is a
division of labour among nations on a kind of caste plan.
There is much to be said for it. In no other way could civilization
have been spread so fast; by no other method could the world have
become so rich in a few years. There was much to be said, also, for
piracy. It diffused, manners, customs, and wealth; it made peoples
acquainted with one another; it made a flat world round and laid the
foundations of modern commerce. In the modern case all difficulty
begins when the peoples to whom the less profitable tasks have been
allotted become intelligently dissatisfied and resolve to change their
status, as the American colonists did, as the Japanese did, as now all
lusty nations are doing, last of all the Chinese.
Modern trade evolved from piracy. There was a time when all transfer of
goods between nations was by joyous might. It is pleasant to believe
that the cause of the decline of piracy was a rise in the moral sense
of mankind. It is more likely to have been the other way—that as piracy
declined for rational reasons rules to govern commercial conduct became
necessary. To enforce the rules became everyone’s duty. To break them
was punishable. From this would germinate a moral sense. Piracy was
bound to fail. On a large scale, continuous and competitive, it simply
was not feasible. Competition ruined it.
There was a marginal time in which one was either pirate or trader,
agreeably to circumstance. The early Greek in his dangerous ship never
knew which he was; nor did anyone else. He took when the taking was
good; when it was not, he bartered. The Romans finally abolished piracy
in the Mediterranean, but on the high seas it was the great romantic
enterprize down to a very recent time. Some of its heroes are venerated
as daring navigators, pathbreakers of empire. It takes some effort to
remember that trees are still standing that were already old when the
world was a place where finding was keeping. If what you found was in
the possession of savages or heathens, you exchanged for it the hope of
civilization, maybe a few glass beads. Toward the end, this wonderful
business began to be hedged about with restrictions. You had to be
careful not to take anything forcibly from people who had treaties of
amity with your own country, for if you did they made trouble for you
at home, diplomatically, and you might even be hanged at the end of an
otherwise glorious voyage.
But if you swindled them in trade, that was all right. Naturally, the
first theory of trade was to give the least and get the most. There
was else no point to it.
The significance of trade has fundamentally changed in our time. What
was a private adventure has become a national necessity, vital to the
existing form of the principal industrial states of the world. And yet
that first rude theory of it, representing the step from piracy to
commerce, universally survives. This, at last, is the crucial fact.
It has been impossible to part with the notion that there must be gain
in trade—a profit on one side beyond the mutual satisfaction of unlike
wants with unlike goods. Hence the term, balance of trade, meaning
the balance in your favour, or against you, from the transactions of
commerce. The rule is that the industrial nations come out each year
with a balance in their favour. The countries with whom they have been
exchanging machine-made goods for food and raw materials owe them
money. This simply means that the industrial nations charge more for
what they sell than they pay for what they buy. Hence the gain. That is
how they get rich. It is more than a rule: it is the very principle of
trade; and if you say there is any other principle the commercial mind
becomes instantly stark. What would activate trade if not the hope of
gain?
Nevertheless, trade on that principle is bound to fail, as piracy
failed, and for the same practical reason. On a vast scale, with
unlimited participation, it is not continuously feasible. Every nation
cannot have a favourable trade-balance. So long as three or four
nations had a monopoly of machines and machine-craft, it could be
managed; it could even assume such colossal proportions as to create
the illusion of being permanent as the way of the world. That monopoly
is broken. The machine is increasingly a common possession. Its power
is dispersed, and there is much new and unbidden ecstasy in the
exercise of it. And whereas it was that a few nations exploited many,
what now opens to view is the prospect of all nations simultaneously
engaged in the effort to exploit one another. Every frontier a trade
wall. Each nation forbidding others to do unto it that which it is
bent upon doing to them. So we return to the middle of the sixteenth
century, no wiser than the British were when the Parliament voted _An
Act Avoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made by Handicraftsmen Beyond the
Seas_ (_5 Eliz. c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, Part I, pp.
428-429), 1562_. It reads:
Whereas heretofore the artificers of this realm of England (as well
within the city of London as within other cities, towns, and boroughs
of the same real) that is to wit, girdlers, cutlers, saddlers,
glovers, point-makers, and such like handicraftsmen, have been in the
said faculties greatly wrought, and greatly set on work, as well for
the sustentation of themselves, their wives, and families, as for a
good education of a great part of the youth of this realm in good art
and laudible exercise:
Yet notwithstanding so now it is, that by reason of the abundance of
foreign wares brought into this realm from the parts of beyond the
seas, the said artificers are not only less occupied, and thereby
utterly impoverished, the youth not trained in the said sciences and
exercises, and thereby the said faculties and the exquisite knowledges
thereof like in short time within this realm to decay; but also divers
cities and towns within this realm of England much thereby impaired,
the whole realm greatly endamaged and other countries greatly enriched.
For reformation whereof, be it enacted by our sovereign lady the
Queen’s Highness, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the
Commons of this present parliament assembled and by the authority of
the same, that no person or persons whatsoever, from or after the
feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist now next ensuing, shall bring
or cause to be brought into this realm of England from the parts of
beyond the seas, any girdles, harness for girdles, rapiers, daggers,
knives, hilts, pummels, lockets, chapes, dagger-blades, handles,
scabbards, and sheaths for knives, saddles, horseharness, stirrups,
bits, gloves, points, leather laces, or pins, being ready made or
wrought in any parts of beyond the seas, to be sold, bartered, or
exchanged within this realm of England or Wales; upon pain to forfeit
all such wares so to be brought contrary to the true meaning of this
act, in whose hands soever they or any of them shall be found, on the
very value thereof.
Shall it be either this again, or from a universal war of
machine-competition the survival of one titanic industrial nation
with a monopoly of foreign trade and the might to force its surplus
goods on other people’s markets? That nation would fall in time and
not altogether from its own weight. It would, of course, abuse its
power; but, moreover, it would be unable to collect its favourable
trade-balances from all the rest of the world.
Logical extremes are fictions of thought. It is always another thing
that happens. The one impossibility is for trade to wear in its present
character. It has come to the end of its theory, witness the dread with
which European statesmen, economists, and industrialists regard the
payment of German reparations. How shall Germany pay? In goods. There
is no other way. She cannot pay in gold. There is not that much gold
in the whole world. The Allied creditors actually lend her a little
gold in order that she may recover from her amazing act of bankruptcy
and get back to the way of producing exportable wealth. But to whom
shall she deliver her goods, or sell them? Great Britain does not want
them. Her anxiety is how to keep her own factories going. They make
the same goods. France does not wish them, nor Belgium, nor Italy, nor
the United States, and all for the same reason. They have a potential
surplus of industrial commodities from their own machines. Then shall
Germany sell her goods in other markets and turn the money proceeds
over to Great Britain, France, _et al_? But they themselves need those
other markets on which to sell their own industrial products. German
competition is not wanted there. Thus an _impasse_.
If, in desperation, the Allied creditors forgave Germany her reparation
debt, or so much of it as she should be obliged to pay in competitive
goods, that would be still worse. For Germany would then compete in
those other markets on her own initiative and keep the profit. And all
the time those other markets, in Asia, Africa, South America, tend to
become less and less exploitable because they belong to people who
have begun to found industries of their own and are in the way to be
natively supplied with manufactures.
VII
DIM VISTAS NEW
It must occur to you that what the world requires to find is a new
conception of commerce among nations—one that shall be free of the
predatory impulse, above the exploiting motive, competitive in some
nobler sense. It need not be magnanimous or unselfish—not yet; but only
enlightened enough to comprehend the latter meaning of events.
For a superseding principle the perfect pattern is represented in
nature, where you see dissimilar organisms existing together in a state
of symbiosis, one sustaining the other, vitally interdependent, yet
neither exploiting the other.
There is no accrual of advantage to one side, no gain, no favourable
balance of trade. One gives exactly as much as it receives and two
wants are equally satisfied, with nothing to boot either way.
This is very different from parasitism, which is one-sided, for gain
only. And there is a very curious suggestion that organisms now
existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once
parasitic and learned better.
It cannot be supposed that nations will ever deliberately substitute a
principle of mutualism for the principle of gain in trade. They could
not if they would. Those that have the advantage must fight for it to
the end. Commerce itself, if you look to it, is a complex structure
of growth for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It
cannot change its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It
has instead a vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with
necessity and circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed
ideally by mass intelligence. The conglomerate mind is irresponsibly,
impersonally selfish; it cannot act without experience. There is no
experience of peoples sustaining one another on a sympathetic plan,
each willing to give as much as it takes, with no balance favourable or
unfavourable to be settled in gold or debt. This has never happened.
It is an idea only.
But if now we move our point of view from the centre to the
circumference, we shall see already taking place, with the force
of natural events, momentous alterations in the scheme of economic
life—one of decay and one of revaluation.
We witness almost unawares the ruin of that classic enterprise of
empire which is founded upon the theory of a balance of trade and a
division of labour whereby the colonies, the dominions, the subject and
mandated peoples are hewers, drawers, and food-bringers, serving those
who live in cities, practise machine-craft, and think themselves wholly
benevolent.
The machine has betrayed it. Nothing more unexpected has occurred
since the discovery of a simple chemical reaction that was to destroy
the privileged warrior-caste among mankind. When a splendid knight in
armour was powerless against the peasant with a musket and a knight
with a musket no better than a peasant, the romantic profession of arms
was doomed. Gunpowder ended the age of chivalry. Ultimate military
power passed to the people.
And now for hundreds of millions of people hitherto inferior in
status the machine is a symbol of liberation, freedom, independence,
recognition, racial power. Japan is the thrilling example in Asia. Did
it not deliver her from a thraldom imposed by the Western Powers in
the interest of their own trade? Did it not make her in one generation
their equal, a nation to be feared? Certainly for these reasons use and
possession of the machine will increase in the world beyond any natural
economic ratio, and both the power and profit of empire will cease.
The other alteration, already beginning to be visible though not yet
adequately understood, is a change in the value of food. Three causes
henceforth will be operating together to make food dear. First, as
cities continue to grow and the industrial population of the earth
continues to augment faster than the agricultural population, the need
to import food will be always greater; second, the exportable surplus
of food will be always less because as the agricultural and low-craft
nations progress toward their ideal of industrial independence they
will consume more and more of their own food products; and third, the
supply of those industrial commodities that are exchanged for food will
enormously increase.
In the language of the economist, the agricultural index will rise and
the industrial index will fall. It will require a greater quantity of
manufactures to buy a bushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheat to buy
a manufactured article. This will not be for one year or two. It will
be lasting. It will affect the status of great groups and classes of
people. In the cities and industrial centres the cost of living will
move in a vertical manner.
The difficulties of food-importing countries may, almost certainly
will, become desperate. The people of Great Britain, for example,
will pay dearly for the wealth they have amassed by industry in the
last seventy-five years. If the value of food, priced in British
machine-wares, should double, then for the same quantity of food as
before they would have to give twice the quantity of manufactured
goods, which would mean twice as much labour and no more to eat. The
same difficulties will beset all countries not self-contained in food.
They will exhort their people to return to the fields, which the people
will be loth to do, having tasted cities. They will expect their
governments to make food cheaper by edict, or to buy it out of taxation
and distribute it gratis. Moreover, in some countries, taking again the
case of Great Britain as notable, there may not be enough land. The
people perhaps could not feed themselves no matter how intensively they
worked their fields, industry having multiplied the population beyond
the utmost potentiality of a native food supply. Obviously indicated is
a movement of dispersal together with a limitation upon the increase
of industrial population. More power will pass to countries, like the
United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, that have the advantage
of enormous food-reserves. Their problems will be internal.
None of this can happen without much blind and violent resistance.
But, of course, it will not happen all at once, not all in one place,
nor in every case with a clear meaning. And it is not certain that any
amount of experience, however painful, will bring nations to adopt what
we have called a symbiotic principle of commerce with one another.
There is at first the danger that agriculture in its turn will exploit
industry as industry has exploited peasantry and that those who possess
or control resources of food and raw materials will hold them too dear,
thereby taking the industrial nations into their debt or provoking them
to insane measures.
Thus the opportunity to go forward might be lost in passion. The fate
of retrogression is possible. This has happened many times. It is much
less probable than ever before, however, for many reasons that seem
permanent. When knowledge was a precious torch borne aloft by a few
hands through storm and stress, it was easily quenched. Then darkness.
You can hardly imagine destruction of the existing body of science,
technology, and fact-knowledge. The mass of it is too great to be lost.
That, of course, has nothing to do with wisdom. By knowledge alone man
might extinguish himself utterly. But to suppose that he will not find
a new way to go on with, that he will either move the old struggle to
new ground or return to medievalism, is to believe there is no law of
human progress.
The probability is that he will find the way unknowingly, by groping,
and will be well upon it before he has had time to formulate any clear
idea or theory of what he is doing. He will have found little by little
that it pays, better than any other way, not as he once understood
profit, but in terms of enduring satisfactions, which may include
peace. Critical understanding of it will come later with reflection,
and as it comes he will rid his mind of the phantasy in pursuit of
which he has made the world so much richer in things than in happiness.
Seeing now only how relentlessly the curse pursued him still and how
the affliction of monotonous toil if it be lifted in one place is made
heavier in another, he is torn with a sense of frustration. But the
view is wrong—false to his first nature. He forgets the truth of his
own myth. Somewhere down the ages it got turned upside down. Once he
dwelt in the Garden of Eden, or supposed he did, and cared not for it.
He was bored there and beguiled to his fall. The figure at the gate
forbidding his return is a symbol of self-knowledge; it was set there
by his own forethought, lest he should be tempted to go back.
If the machine with which he has believed himself to be storming a
childish wish ever brought him to a state of effortless ease on earth,
that would be his last.
It may be a power he is yet morally unprepared to exercise. How strange
at least that with an incentive so trivial and naïve in itself he
should have been able to perform an absolute feat of creation!
The machine was not. He reached his mind into emptiness and seized it.
Even yet he cannot realize what he has done. Out of the free elemental
stuff of the universe, visible and invisible, some of it imponderable,
such as lightning, he has invented a class of typhonic, mindless
organisms, exempt from the will of nature.
We have no understanding of creation, its process or meaning. The
machine is the externalized image of man’s thoughts. It is furthermore
an extension of his life, for we perceive as an economic fact that
human existence in its present phase, on its present scale, could not
continue in its absence. And what are we ourselves, life to begin
with, if not an image of thought? Perhaps it is true as a principle of
creation that the image and its creator must co-exist, inseparably.
In any light, man’s further task is Jovian. That is to learn how best
to live with these powerful creatures of his mind, how to give their
fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in
error against himself—since he cannot live without them.
_Each, pott 8vo, 2/6 net_ _Occasionally illustrated_
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
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at once recognized as a noteworthy event. Written from various points
of view, one book frequently opposing the argument of another, they
provide the reader with a stimulating survey of the most modern thought
in many departments of life. Several volumes are devoted to the future
trend of Civilization, conceived as a whole; while others deal with
particular provinces, and cover the future of Woman, War, Population,
Clothes, Wireless, Morals, Drama, Poetry, Art, Sex, Law, etc.
It is interesting to see in these neat little volumes, issued at a low
price, the revival of a form of literature, the Pamphlet, which has
been in disuse for 200 years.
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TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
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