The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
of the book this particular passage was deleted.[9]
It is not necessary now to labour the point, in view of all that has happened in Paris. The dilemma suggested fifteen years ago is precisely the dilemma which confronted the makers of the Peace Treaty; it is, indeed, precisely the dilemma which confronts us to-day.
It applies not only to the Indemnity, Reparations, but to our entire policy, to larger aspects of our relations with the enemy. Hence the paralysis which results from the two mutually exclusive aims of the Treaty of Versailles: the desire on the one hand to reduce the enemy’s strength by checking his economic vitality—and on the other to restore the general productivity of Europe, to which the economic life of the enemy is indispensable.
France found herself, at the end of the War, in a desperate financial position and in dire need of all the help which could come from the enemy towards the restoration of her devastated districts. She presented demands for reparation running to vast, unprecedented sums. So be it. Germany then was to be permitted to return to active and productive work, to be permitted to have the iron and the other raw materials necessary for the production of the agricultural machinery, the building material and other sorts of goods France needed. Not the least in the world! Germany was to produce this great mass of wealth, but her factories were to remain closed, her rolling stock was to be taken from her, she was to have neither food nor raw materials. This is not some malicious travesty of the attitude which prevailed at the time that the Treaty was made. It was, and to a large extent still is, the position taken by many French publicists as well as by some in England. Mr. Vanderlip, the American banker, describes in his book[10] the attitude which he found in Paris during the Conference in these words: ‘The French burn to milk the cow but insist first that its throat must be cut.’
Despite the lessons of the year which followed the signing of the Treaty, one may doubt whether even now the nature of wealth and ‘money’ has come home to the Chauvinists of the Entente countries. The demand that we should at one and the same time forbid Germany to sell so much as a pen-knife in the markets of the world and yet compel her to pay us a tribute which could only be paid by virtue of a foreign trade greater than any which she has been able to maintain in the past—these mutually exclusive demands are still made in our own Parliament and Press.
How powerfully the Nationalist fears operate to obscure the plain alternatives is revealed in a letter of M. André Tardieu, written more than eighteen months after the Armistice.
M. Tardieu, who was M. Clemenceau’s political lieutenant in the framing of the Treaty, and one of the principal inspirers of the French policy, writing in July, 1920, long after the condition of Europe and the Continent’s economic dependence on Germany had become visible, ‘warns’ us of the ‘danger’ that Germany may recover unless the Treaty is applied in all its rigour! He says:—
‘Remember your own history and remember what the rat de terre de cousin which Great Britain regarded with such disdain after the Treaty of Frankfurt became in less than forty years. We shall see Germany recover economically, profiting by the ruins she has made in other countries, with a rapidity which will astonish the world. When that day arrives, if we have given way at Spa to the madness of letting her off part of the debt that was born of her crime, no courses will be too strong for the Governments which allowed themselves to be duped. M. Clemenceau always said to British and American statesmen: “We of France understand Germany better than you.” M. Clemenceau was right, and in bringing his colleagues round to his point of view he did good work for the welfare of humanity. If the work of last year is to be undone, the world will be delivered up to the economic hegemony of Germany before twenty-five years have passed. There could be no better proof than the recent despatches of The Times correspondent in Germany, which bear witness to the fever of production which consumes Herr Stinnes and his like. Such evidence is stronger than the biased statistics of Mr. Keynes. Those who refuse to take it into account will be the criminals in the eyes of their respective countries.’[11]
Note M. Tardieu’s argument. He fears the restoration of Germany industry, unless we make her pay the whole indemnity. That is to say, in other words, if we compel Germany to produce during the next twenty-five years something like ten thousand millions worth of wealth over and above her own needs, involving as it must a far greater output from her factories, mines, shipyards, laboratories, a far greater development of her railways, ports, canals, a far greater efficiency and capacity in her workers than has ever been known in the past, if that takes place as it must if we are to get an indemnity on the French scale, why, in that case, there will be no risk of Germany’s making too great an economic recovery!
The English Press is not much better. It was in December, 1918, that Professor Starling presented to the British Government his report showing that unless Germany had more food she would be utterly unable to pay any large indemnity to aid in reparations to France. Fully eighteen months later we find the Daily Mail (June 18, 1920) rampaging and shouting itself hoarse at the monstrous discovery that the Government have permitted Germans to purchase wheat! Yet the Mail has been foremost in insisting upon France’s dire need for a German indemnity in order to restore devastated districts. If the Mail is really representative of John Bull, then that person is at present in the position of a farmer who at seed-time is made violently angry at the suggestion that grain should be taken for the purpose of sowing the land, and shouts that it is a wicked proposal to take food from the mouths of his children. Although the Northcliffe Press has itself published page advertisements (from the Save the Children Fund) describing the incredible and appalling conditions in Europe, the Daily Mail shouts in its leading article: ‘Is British Food to go to the Boches?’ The thing is in the best war style. ‘Is there any reason why the Briton should be starved to feed the German?’ asks the Mail. And there follows, of course, the usual invective about the submarines, war criminals, the sinking of hospital ships, and the approval by the whole German people of all these crimes.
We get here, as at every turn and twist of our policy, not any recognition of interdependence, but a complete repudiation of that idea, and an assumption, instead, of a conflict of interest. If the children of Vienna or Berlin are to be fed, then it is assumed that it must be at the expense of the children of Paris and London. The wealth of the world is conceived as a fixed quantity, unaffected by any process of co-operation between the peoples sharing the world. The idea is, of course, an utter fallacy. French or Belgian children will have more, not less, if we take measures to avoid European conditions in which the children of Vienna are left to die. If, during the winter of 1919–1920, French children died from sickness due to lack of fuel, it was because the German coal was not delivered, and the German coal was not delivered because, among other things, of general disorganization of transport, of lack of rolling stock, of underfeeding of the miners, of collapse of the currency, political unrest, uncertainty of the future.
It is one of the contradictions of the whole situation that France herself gives intermittent recognition to the fact of this interdependence. When, at Spa, it became evident that coal simply could not be delivered in the quantities demanded unless Germany had some means of buying imported food, France consented to what was in fact a loan to Germany (to the immense mystification of certain journalistic critics in Paris). One is prompted to ask what those who, before the War so scornfully treated the present writer for throwing doubts upon the feasibility of a post-war indemnity, would have said had he predicted that on the morrow of victory, the victor, instead of collecting a vast indemnity would from the simplest motives of self-protection, out of his own direly depleted store of capital, be advancing money to the vanquished.[12]
The same inconsistency runs through much of our post-war behaviour. The famine in Central Europe has become so appalling that very great sums are collected in Britain and America for its relief. Yet the reduced productivity out of which the famine has arisen was quite obviously deliberately designed, and most elaborately planned by the economic provisions of the Treaty and by the blockades prolonged after the Armistice, for months in the case of Germany and years in the case of Russia. And at the very time that advertisements were appearing in the Daily Mail for ‘Help to Starving Europe,’ and only a few weeks before France consented to advance money for the purpose of feeding Germany, that paper was working up ‘anti-Hun stunts’ for the purpose of using