The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
of civilisation; for our technical knowledge in the management of matter is greater even than before the War.
What then is the reason why these millions starve in the midst of potential plenty? It is that they have lost, from certain moral causes examined later in these pages, the capacity to co-ordinate their labour sufficiently to carry on the processes by which alone labour and knowledge can be applied to an exploitation of nature sufficiently complete to support our dense modern populations.
The fact that wealth is not to-day a material which can be taken, but a process which can only be maintained by virtue of certain moral factors, marks a change in human relationship, the significance of which still seems to escape us.
The manor, or even the eighteenth century village, was roughly a self-sufficing unit. It mattered little to that unit what became of the outside world. The manor or village was independent; its people could be cut off from the outside world, could ravage the near parts of it and remain unaffected. But when the development of communication and the discovery of steam turns the agricultural community into coal miners, these are no longer indifferent to the condition of the outside world. Cut them off from the agriculturalists who take their coal or manufactures, or let these latter be unable to carry on their calling, and the miner starves. He cannot eat his coal. He is no longed independent. His life hangs upon certain activities of others. Where his forebears could have raided and ravaged with no particular hurt to themselves, the miner cannot. He is dependent upon those others and has given them hostages. He is no longer ‘independent,’ however clamorously in his Nationalist oratory he may use that word. He has been forced into a relation of partnership. And how very small is the effectiveness of any physical coercion he can apply, in order to exact the services by which he lives, we shall see presently.
This situation of interdependence is of course felt much more acutely by some countries than others—much more by England, for instance, than by France. France in the matter of essential foodstuffs can be nearly self-supporting, England cannot. For England, an outside world of fairly high production is a matter of life and death; the economic consideration must in this sense take precedence of others. In the case of France considerations of political security are apt to take precedence of economic considerations. France can weaken her neighbours vitally without being brought to starvation. She can purchase security at the cost of mere loss of profits on foreign trade by the economic destruction of, say, Central Europe. The same policy would for Britain in the long run spell starvation. And it is this fundamental difference of economic situation which is at the bottom of much of the divergence of policy between Britain and France which has recently become so acute.
This is the more evident when we examine recent changes of detail in this general situation special to England. Before the War a very large proportion of our food and raw material was supplied by the United States. But our economic relationship with that country has been changed as the result of the War. Previous to 1914 we were the creditor and America the debtor nation. She was obliged to transmit to us large sums in interest on investments of British capital. These annual payments were in fact made in the form of food and raw materials, for which, in a national sense, we did not have to give goods or services in return. We are now less in the position of creditor, more in that of debtor. America does not have to transmit to us. Whereas, originally, we did an immense proportion of America’s carrying trade, because she had no ocean-going mercantile marine, she has begun to do her own carrying. Further, the pressure of her population upon her food resources is rapidly growing. The law diminishing returns is in some instances beginning to apply to the production of food, which in the past has been plentiful without fertilisers and under a very wasteful and simple system. And in America, as elsewhere, the standard of consumption, owing to a great increase of the wage standard, has grown, while the standard of production has not always correspondingly increased.
The practical effect of this is to throw England into greater dependence upon certain new sources of food—or trade, which in the end is the same thing. The position becomes clearer if we reflect that our dependence becomes more acute with every increase of our population. Our children now at school may be faced by the problem of finding food for a population of sixty or seventy millions on these islands. A high agricultural productivity on the part of countries like Russia and Siberia and the Balkans might well be then a life and death matter.
Now the European famine has taught us a good deal about the necessary conditions of high agricultural productivity. The co-operation of manufactures—of railways for taking crops out and fertilisers in, of machinery, tools, wagons, clothing—is one of them. That manufacturing itself must be done by division of labour is another: the country or area that is fitted to supply textiles or cream separators is not necessarily fitted to supply steel rails: yet until the latter are supplied the former cannot be obtained. Often productivity is paralysed simply because transport has broken down owing to lack of rolling stock, or coal, or lubricants, or spare parts for locomotives; or because a debased currency makes it impossible to secure food from peasants, who will not surrender it in return for paper that has no value—the manufactures which might ultimately give it value being paralysed. The lack of confidence in the maintenance of the value of paper money, for instance, is rapidly diminishing the food productivity of the soil; peasants will not toil to produce food which they cannot exchange, through the medium of money, for the things which they need—clothing, implements, and so on. This diminishing productivity is further aggravated by the impossibility of obtaining fertilisers (some of which are industrial products, and all of which require transport), machines, tools, etc. The food producing capacity of Europe cannot be maintained without the full co-operation of the non-agricultural industries—transport, manufactures, coal mining, sound banking—and the maintenance of political order. Nothing but the restoration of all the economic processes of Europe as a whole can prevent a declining productivity that must intensify social and political disorder, of which we may merely have seen the beginning.
But if this interdependence of factory and farm in the production of food is indisputable, though generally ignored, it involves a further fact just as indisputable, and even more completely ignored. And the further fact is that the manufacturing and the farming, neither of which can go on without the other, may well be situated in different States. Vienna starves largely because the coal needed for its factories is now situated in a foreign State—Czecho-Slovakia—which, partly from political motives perhaps, fails to deliver it. Great food producing areas in the Balkans and Russia are dependent for their tools and machinery, for the stability of the money without which the food will not be produced, upon the industries of Germany. Those industries are destroyed, the markets have disappeared, and with them the incentive to production. The railroads of what ought to be food producing States are disorganized from lack of rolling stock, due to the same paralysis of German industry; and so the food production is diminished. Tens of millions of acres outside Germany, whose food the world sorely needs, have been rendered barren by the industrial paralysis of the Central Empires which the economic terms of the Treaty render inevitable.
Speaking of the need of Russian agriculture for German industry, Mr. Maynard Keynes, who has worked out the statistics revealing the relative position of Germany to the rest of Europe, writes:—
‘It is impossible geographically and for many other reasons for Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans to undertake it—we have neither the incentive nor the means for doing the work on a sufficient scale. Germany, on the other hand, has the experience, the incentive, and to a large extent, the materials for furnishing the Russian peasant with the goods of which he has been starved for the past five years, for reorganising the business of transport and collection, and so for bringing into the world’s pool, for the common advantage, the supplies from which we are now disastrously cut off. … If we oppose in detail every means by which Germany or Russia can recover their material well-being, because we feel a national, racial, or political hatred for their populations or their governments, we must be prepared to face the consequences of such feelings. Even if there is no moral solidarity between the newly-related races of Europe, there is an economic solidarity which we cannot disregard. Even now, the world markets are one. If we do not allow Germany to exchange products with Russia and so feed herself, she must inevitably compete with us for the produce of the New World. The more successful we are in snapping economic relations between Germany and Russia, the more we shall depress