IVWHO MIND THEM OR STARVE
Whatis it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines? That industry will be unable to make a profit?
No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born—at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. It is usually the case, too, that they have to buy the raw materials on which their machines act, as Great Britain buys raw cotton from the United States and Egypt, and wool from Australia, to feed her great textile industries; having manufactured this material, she sends it forth again as cloth, to be exchanged for wheat in Canada or beef in South America.
As you begin with machines your population divides. It becomes part rural and part industrial, and so long as the rural part of it can feed the industrial part there is no trouble. But a time soon comes when the need of the industrial workers for sustenance is greater than the native production of food. This time inevitably comes because the machines call up people so rapidly. Then you have to look abroad for food. That means you have to go into other countries—peasant-countries—where there is a surplus of meat and grain, and exchange there your manufactured goods for food. And you begin to think and speak of your economic necessity.
There is no such necessity really. To assert it is to say a preposterous thing, namely, that when your industrial population has increased beyond the native food-supply, to a point at which you are out of balance, you are obliged to import food so that your industrial population may continue to increase and your cities to grow and your necessity to become greater and greater in an endless spiral.
It cannot be endless. One of two things will determine the sequel. Either presently the resources of those peasant-nationsthat produce a surplus of food will be exhausted or they will in time think to become industrial nations, too, and eat their own surplus. There is no lucid reason why a population should not disperse as it begins to exceed the native food-supply—that is to say, migrate to the sources of food.
In this new political dogma of an absolute economic necessity to import food and raw materials in exchange for manufactures the ancient myth-wish reappears. The machine does not abolish the curse of toil. It was not the escape men sought. But it does create a preferred task.
Traditionally, the peasant-task has been despised: it bore the curse direct. And, when the machine made it possible for many to embrace instead what was deemed the lesser affliction of industrial labour gregariously performed in cities, the impulse thereto was headlong.
Hence the rise of that angular phenomenon called the industrial nation—a nation able to buy its food, therefore delivered from the fate of peasantry and for that reason entitled to consider itself of higher caste than agricultural nations.
Hence the tumescent city as one of themost alarming appearances of our time.
Hence, also, that idea of economic necessity, which, getting control of the political mind of Europe, inevitably involved the world in a machine-war. What made that war so terrifying, so destructive, so extensive, was the power of the machine—an inconceivable power except as it disclosed itself from day to day. No one beholding the event from a firmamental point of view could have supposed it was a war between races of men. Man in contrast with the machines he served was pitifully insignificant.
In Germany the task of bending the country’s industrial equipment to the uses of war was assigned to a man who possessed one of the very brilliant Jewish minds in the world. In him were combined the three high characteristics of his race, which are loyalty, intellectual realism, and dreaming imagination. His practical job was more complex than that of the Chief of Staff. Yet his mind was not wholly occupied with this care. His critical faculties and his imagination were always free.
Reflecting on the economic meaning of the war, he was led to examine the essential character of international trade, and soperceived clearly how wasteful, preposterous, and dangerous a great deal of it was—Germany pressing the surplus product of her machines for sale in Great Britain, the British doing likewise in Germany, both competing at home and abroad with the industrial surplus of the United States, ships passing on the seas with cargoes of similar goods endlessly duplicated, and all the machine-craft nations seeking peasant-nations to be exploited for food in exchange for manufactures. It was true in this way the world had been growing richer in things, and yet the cost was frightful. The resort to force was a confession that international trade was bankrupt in reason and understanding.
He was competent to reach a conclusion standing himself at the head of one of Europe’s great industries. And he made a dream. It was that, when the war had come to an end and people were themselves again, they would see the vital importance to civilization of dividing among them the work of the world agreeably to their special aptitudes and the facts of environment—those to produce a surplus of whatever it was they had a genius for making and the materials ready; theseothers another kind of thing in which their skill and situation gave them an advantage; and so on through the whole series of natural and artificial things with which human wants are satisfied. Thus duplication and strife would be eliminated. Not only would there be enough of everything: from the elimination of senseless waste in private and public war there would be a saving of power and capital sufficient to water all the deserts of the earth and recreate man’s vistas here.
As a dream, it was most alluring. As a plan it was worthless, for it contained two fatal assumptions, namely, that you could always find a Solomon to administer it and that people would submit to the benevolent tyranny of his wisdom. He himself was destined by his end to illustrate how people really behave. Shortly after the close of the war he was murdered in the name of fanatic nationalism.
It was a sign.
The war released a flood of repressed passions in nationalism. Great and small groups of submerged people asserted rights of self-determination and clothed themselves with frontiers and nationhood. Nearly all of these, together also with oldcountries whose character until then had been agricultural, were concurrently seized with the thought of economic independence—that is to say, with the thought of having machines and industries of their own, for they had seen a new thing. Industrial nations and none other were powerful in the world. Nations without machines were helpless, subject, in fact, to those that had them.
Enormously stimulated in its function of reproduction by the onset of this human idea, the machine broke bounds. No one now has any control of it.
Only a few years ago Great Britain alone controlled it. She had a monopoly of its power and use by right of having been the first to develop it, and she was for a while the only nation having a large surplus of manufactures to sell in foreign countries. Then came Germany, France, and Belgium. Of these Germany was Great Britain’s most aggressive rival, making nearly all of the same things and most of them cheaper. After 1870 the United States developed industry very fast but for twenty years more her exports were principally agricultural because she herself consumed the entire product of hermachines, besides importing manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for meat and grain and raw cotton. It was not until about 1890 that American machine-products began to invade the markets of the world in a large way. And at about the same time Japan appeared as an industrial nation, having in a few years equipped herself with Western machines and trained her imitative hand to mind them.
Such, roughly, was the economic state of the world at the outbreak of the War. The powerfully industrialized nations were four in Europe, counting little Belgium; one in the West; and one in the East—six altogether, representing hardly more than one-fifth of the world’s total population.
If we regard only the countries where the industrial population had so outrun the native food-supply that the sale of manufactures in foreign lands to pay for food had either become, or was believed to be, a vital transaction, then we count out the United States. This country is still self-nourished. That leaves only five, and the competition among these five for markets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to be instructed in wanting, for private pathways by land and sea to the sources of food, foraccess to the raw materials required by their machines, was already desperate and dangerous. Between two of them it was deadly.
Even then it was so. Since then the machine has multiplied tremendously where its habitat was and has gone migrating, besides, all over the earth.
In those six countries that were already intensively industrialized what appears? Their machine equipment has greatly increased. During the War it increased for obvious reasons. God was on the side of the most machines. Since the War it has continued to increase for other reasons. One reason was peculiar to Germany. There the building of furnaces, factories, and machine-works by a dynastic method, as the pyramids were built, without credit or gold, simply by command of the industrialists over labour and material, was a way of baffling the Allied creditors. Another reason was peculiar to France. Restoring the industries of the devastated regions meant building them a second time, since they had been already once reproduced elsewhere in France during the War. But the reason over all lay in that fixed idea of economic necessity, not changed inthe least by anything that had happened, only now more desperate than ever, owing both to the intensified competition of the older countries among themselves and to the spread of the machine into other countries.
How the competition among themselves has been intensified may be illustrated in the case of textiles as between Great Britain and France. Before the War both imported raw cotton and exported fabrications of cotton; but, whereas Great Britain exported principally the cotton cloth of universal commerce, France exported special products representing her genius for style and artistry. Now, however, having made large additions to her general textile equipment, France feels obliged to compete directly with Great Britain in cotton-cloth of common commerce. To do this she must extend her foreign trade parallel to Great Britain’s and divide the markets hitherto dominated by the British. As with cotton-cloth, so with other manufactures, particularly those of iron and steel, wherein France proposes to compete and is equipped to compete with both Germany and Great Britain as never before. Each step shetakes in this direction augments her economic necessity, for now almost the last thing you would expect to see in France is taking place. The native population as a whole is static, but its character is changing. The industrial part of it is growing; the agricultural part is waning. People are deserting the fields to embrace industrial life—to mind machines. In every city there is a housing problem; public credit is employed to build small dwellings for the wage-earners; yet in the country, two hours from Paris, you will see houses empty and going to ruin, whole rural villages in the way to be abandoned, vineyards perishing for want of care, fields going to grass instead of grain. Their industrial power is rising; their agricultural power is falling. Before the War they were, or might have been, self-nourishing on their own soil like the people of the United States. That precious security they cast away. In place of it they take on the anxieties of empire. They must impose upon Morocco the blessings of European civilization in order to have an outlet there for the surplus of their machines.
Dramatic are the migrations of the machine and not unlike the migrations ofnatural species, men and beasts, in search of food. The machine seeks either cheaper raw material or people to mind its processes.
There is Italy, with a population greater than that of France, growing half-a-million a year. It is the most fecund race in Europe. Suddenly the Italians wake up and are resolved upon an industrial career. Before the War this thought was dim among them. In the crisis it took shape. Since the War it has become an enthusiasm, and now smoke-towers are rising very fast. Definitely they have turned their minds from agriculture to industry, not merely in order that they may become self-supplied with manufactures instead of buying them from other countries with lemons and olive oil, but in order to grow rich and powerful in foreign trade. They propose hereafter and progressively to exchange machine-wares for food. Italy will be a formidable rival for Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, who are already beginning to feel it.
Poland perceives her destiny to be industrial: she has already a large surplus of manufactured goods to sell. LikewiseCzechoslovakia. These are instances of new countries. Spain and Greece are importing machinery, and Spain is so anxious to develop industry that she considers paying a bounty out of the public treasury on exports of textiles. India, whose historic economic function had been to send raw cotton to Great Britain and buy cotton cloth from Manchester, now consumes half her own raw cotton in her native mills; she not only satisfies three-quarters of her own want for cotton cloth but is beginning actually to export that commodity, even to the United States. This will seem very wasteful, indeed, when you pause to set it against the historical background of the United States. For a long time we exported raw cotton and imported cotton cloth. That was to have been the pattern of our economic life as a British colony; we were to produce only raw materials, ship them to Great Britain and buy from her the surplus of her machines. We were forbidden, in fact, to weave cloth for sale or to have iron mills. Now we are an industrial nation; we consume more and more of our own raw cotton and export enormous quantities of cotton cloth. Ultimately we shall have no raw cotton atall to sell; our mills will require the whole of our annual crop; we shall have nothing but cotton cloth to sell. To whom shall we sell it? Not to the Indians; they wish to make their own. Probably not to the Egyptians. The Japanese manufacturers of cotton goods have recently invaded the Egyptian market that was formerly Great Britain’s own, and are underselling the British there. You would think China would be Japan’s natural outlet for cotton goods. So it is. The difficulty is that Japan must be looking further because China is beginning to supply herself.
The Chinese instance is poignant. A few years ago—until the War, in fact—China exported food and raw materials and imported manufactured goods—nothing else to speak of either way. This was as the Western industrial nations wished it to be. So anxious were they to have it so that they bound China by treaty not to put tariff barriers against the goods they wished to sell in the Chinese markets, except by mutual consent—that is to say, with their consent.
The War suspended this thraldom. The Chinese imported machines and began to make their own things, especially cloth.Power-looms appeared as by magic. And after the War, they continued to appear. During three years after the War the number trebled, and in 1922, the table of Chinese imports and exports presented a strange face. Among her imports were machines and machine-parts; also semimanufactured goods to be finished in Chinese factories. And one-fifth of her total exports consisted of manufactured goods. China an exporter of machine products!
And so up and down the earth. In Brazil, where there was hardly any visible production of artificial things before 1914, the whole outlook has changed. That country is now able from her own machines to meet the whole of her want for matches, textiles, footgear, wallpaper, phonograph-discs, hardware, hats, and playing cards, and will soon be self-supplied with practically everything she needs.
The Colonial System that was to have answered forever Great Britain’s need for raw materials and food in exchange for machine-products will not hold in that character. In India the revolt is political; elsewhere it is peaceably economic. Canada is already powerfully machined; she isexporting motor-cars. Australia, going in the same direction, is beginning to export shoes. The Union of South Africa takes steps to subsidize local industry. Ireland no sooner gains control of her economic life than she puts a tariff-wall around herself to limit the sale of foreign goods, meaning British goods as well, thinking thereby to foster infant industries.
Well, everyone now is doing that. The old industrial countries, too, are protecting themselves against one another’s goods, the last to come to it being Great Britain herself. For more than half-a-century she was the protagonist of free trade, abhoring tariffs, because she was paramount in machine-craft and could beat her rivals both in their own markets and in her own. That advantage having departed from her, she is driven to tariff-protection: she puts up barriers against other people’s goods if they are too cheap, because they are too cheap, and calls it Safeguarding Home Industries.