The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
easily than any emotion of comradeship. And the hate is a hungrier and more persistent emotion than the comradeship. The much proclaimed fellowship of the Allies, ‘cemented by the blood shed on the field,’ vanished rapidly. But hate remained and found expression in the social struggle, in fierce repressions, in bickerings, fears, and rancours between those who yesterday fought side by side. Yet the price of survival is, as we have seen, an ever closer cohesion and social co-operation.
And while it is undoubtedly true that the ‘hunger of hate’—the actual desire to have something to hate—may so warp our judgment as to make us see a conflict of interest where none exists, it is also true that a sense of conflict of vital interest is a great feeder of hate. And that sense of conflict may well become keener as the problem of man’s struggle for sustenance on the earth becomes more acute, as his numbers increase and the pressure upon that sustenance becomes greater.
Once more, as millions of children are born at our very doors into a world that cannot feed them, condemned, if they live at all, to form a race that will be defective, stunted, unhealthy, abnormal, this question which Malthus very rightly taught our grandfathers to regard as the final and ultimate question of their Political Economy, comes dramatically into the foreground. How can the earth, which is limited, find food for an increase of population which is unlimited?
The haunting anxieties which lie behind the failure to find a conclusive answer to that question, probably affect political decisions and deepen hostilities and animosities even where the reason is ill-formulated or unconscious. Some of us, perhaps, fear to face the question lest we be confronted with morally terrifying alternatives. Let posterity decide its own problems. But such fears, and the motives prompted by them, do not disappear by our refusal to face them. Though hidden, they still live, and under various moral disguises influence our conduct.
Certainly the fears inspired by the Malthusian theory and the facts upon which it is based, have affected our attitude to war; affected the feeling of very many for whom war is not avowedly, as it is openly and avowedly to some of its students, ‘the Struggle for Bread.’[17]
The Great Illusion was an attempt frankly to face this ultimate question of the bearing of war upon man’s struggle for survival. It took the ground that the victory of one nation over another, however complete, does not solve the problem; it makes it worse in that the conditions and instincts which war accentuates express themselves in nationalist and racial rivalries, create divisions that embarrass and sometimes make impossible the widespread co-operation by which alone man can effectively exploit nature.
That demonstration as a whole belongs to the pages that follow. But bearing upon the narrower question of war in relation to the world’s good, this much is certain:—
If the object of the combatants in the War was to make sure of their food, then indeed is the result in striking contrast with that intention, for food is assuredly more insecure than ever alike for victor and vanquished. They differ only in the degree of insecurity. The War, the passions which it has nurtured, the political arrangements which those passions have dictated, have given us a Europe immeasurably less able to meet its sustenance problem than it was before. So much less able that millions, who before the War could well support themselves by their own labour, are now unable so to do and have to be fed by drawing upon the slender stocks of their conquerors—stocks very much less than when some at least of those conquerors were in the position of defeated peoples.
This is not the effect of the material destruction of war, of the mere battering down of houses and bridges and factories by the soldier.
The physical devastation, heart-breaking as the spectacle of it is, is not the difficult part of the problem, nor quantitatively the most important.[18] It is not the devastated districts that are suffering from famine, nor their losses which appreciably diminish the world supply of food. It is in cities in which not a house has been destroyed, in which, indeed, every wheel in every factory is still intact, that the population dies of hunger, and the children have to be fed by our charity. It is the fields over which not a single soldier has tramped that are condemned to sterility because those factories are idle, while the factories are condemned to idleness because the fields are sterile.
The real ‘economic argument’ against war does not consist in the presentation of a balance sheet showing so much cost and destruction and so much gain. The real argument consists in the fact that war, and still more the ideas out of which it arises, produce ultimately an unworkable society. The physical destruction and perhaps the cost are greatly exaggerated. It is perhaps true that in the material foundations of wealth Britain is as well off to-day as before the War. It is not from lack of technical knowledge that the economic machine works with such friction: that has been considerably increased by the War. It is not from lack of idealism and unselfishness. There has been during the last five years such an outpouring of devoted unselfishness—the very hates have been unselfish—as history cannot equal. Millions have given their lives for the contrary ideals in which they believed. It is sometimes the ideals for which men die that make impossible their life and work together.
The real ‘economic argument,’ supported by the experience of our victory, is that the ideas which produce war—the fears out of which it grows and the passions which it feeds—produce a state of mind that ultimately renders impossible the co-operation by which alone wealth can be produced and life maintained. The use of our power or our knowledge for the purpose of subduing Nature to our service depends upon the prevalence of certain ideas, ideas which underlie the ‘art of living together.’ They are something apart from mere technical knowledge which war, as in Germany, may increase, but which can never be a substitute for this ‘art of living together.’ (The arms, indeed, may be the instruments of anarchy, as in so much of Europe to-day).
The War has left us a defective or perverted social sense, with a group of instincts and moralities that are disintegrating Western society, and will, unless checked, destroy it.
These forces, like the ‘ultimate art’ which they have so nearly destroyed, are part of the problem of economics. For they render a production of wealth adequate to welfare impossible. How have they arisen? How can they be corrected? These questions will form an integral part of the problems here dealt with.
CHAPTER II
THE OLD ECONOMY AND THE POST-WAR STATE
THIS chapter suggests the following:—
The trans-national processes which enabled Europe to support itself before the War, were based mainly on private exchanges prompted by the expectation of individual advantage. They were not dependent upon political power. (The fifteen millions for whom German soil could not provide, lived by trade with countries over which Germany had no political control, as a similar number of British live by similar non-political means.)
The old individualist economy has been largely destroyed by the State Socialism introduced for war purposes; the Nation, taking over individual enterprise, became trader and manufacturer in increasing degree. The economic clauses of the Treaty, if enforced, must prolong this tendency, rendering a large measure of such Socialism permanent.
The change may be desirable. But if co-operation must in future be less as between individuals for private advantage, and much more as between nations, Governments acting in an economic capacity, the political emotions of nationalism will play a much larger rôle in the economic processes of Europe. If to Nationalist hostilities as we have known them in the past, is to be added the commercial rivalry of nations now converted into traders and capitalists, we are likely to have not a less but more quarrelsome world, unless the fact of interdependence is much more vividly realised than in the past.
The facts of the preceding chapter touching the economic chaos in Europe, the famine, the debauchery of the currencies, the collapse of credit, the failure to secure indemnities, and particularly the remedies of an international kind to which we are now being forced, all confirm what had indeed become pretty evident before the War, namely, that much of Europe