Читать книгу The War After the War - Isaac Frederick Marcosson - Страница 5

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While the guns roar from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and the greatest armed host that history has ever known is still locked in a life-and-death struggle on a dozen fronts, another war, more potent and permanent perhaps than the one which now engulfs Europe, lurks beyond the distant horizon of peace.

Its fighting line will be the boundaries of all human needs; its dynamic purpose a heroic rehabilitation after stupendous loss. It will be the far-flung struggle for the rich prize of International Trade, waiting at the end of the Crimson Lane that sooner or later will have a turning.

Embattled commercial groups will supplant embroiled nations; boycotts, discriminations and exclusions will succeed the strategies of line and trench; the animosities fought out to-day with shell and steel will have their heritage in ruthless rivalries.

How shall we fare in this tumult of tariff and treaty? Where shall we stand when the curtain of fire fades before a task of regeneration that will spell economic rebirth or disaster for millions? Will fiscal punishment be meted out to neutral and foe alike? Will reason rule or revenge dictate a costly reprisal in this war after the war?

These are the questions that rise out of the dust and din of the colossal upheaval which is rending half of the world. Directly or indirectly they touch the whole American people, regardless of rank or wealth. The tide of war has rolled us far upon the shores of world affairs. We have prospered in the kinship of the nations. Will the ebb of peace leave us high and dry amid a mighty isolation?

I went to England and France to study this problem at first hand. I interviewed Cabinet Ministers; I talked with lawmakers, soldiers, captains of capital, masters of industry, and plain, everyday business men. Often the talk was disturbed by shriek of shell or bomb of midnight Zeppelin marauder.

Through all the travail of debt and death that rends the allied peoples runs the clear current of determination to retrieve the immense loss. War is waste; some one must pay—we among the rest. Already the guns are being trained for the inevitable commercial battle, which, willingly or unwillingly, will bring us under fire. Let us examine the plan of campaign.

But before going into the concrete details that mean so much to our future and our fortune, it is important to understand some very essential conditions.

First and foremost is the uncertainty of the war itself. All prophecy—at best a dangerous thing—is purest speculation. No one can tell how long the duel will last; how badly the loser will be beaten; what the terms of peace will be. Yet out of these contingencies will emerge the strong hands that will redraw the trade map of the world. Whatever the outcome, the countries now fighting, especially the Allies, have definitely stated the principles that must govern—for a long time, at least—the whole realignment of commercial relations. Their way shall be the universal way.

In the second place, be you Ally or Teuton and regardless of how you may feel about the ethics of the Great Struggle, it must be remembered that behind the glamour as to whether it is waged to conserve human liberty, maintain the integrity of "scraps of paper" or to safeguard democracy, the larger fact remains that it is a war rooted in commercial jealousies and fanned by commercial aggressions.

Now we come to the really vital point, and it is this: When the guns are hushed you will find that national and industrial defence among the warring countries will be one and the same thing. The Allies learned to their cost that the economic advance of Germany was merely part of her one-time resistless military machine. Her trade and her preparedness went conqueringly hand in hand. Henceforth that game will be played by all. England, for instance, will manufacture dyestuffs not only for her textile trades, but because coal-tar products are essential to the making of high explosives.

Thus, Competition, which was once merely part of the natural progress of a country, will hereafter be a large part of the struggle for national existence.

There is still another factor: No matter who wins, peace must mean prosperity for everybody. For the victor it will take the form of an attempted stewardship of trade and navigation; for the vanquished it will be the dedication of a terrible energy to the twin restoration of pride and product.

Now you begin to see why it is up to the United States to make ready for whatever business fate awaits her beyond the uncertain frontiers of to-morrow. Nor have we been without warning of what may be in store for us. Prohibitive tariffs, blacklists and boycotts, embargoes on mail and cargo, the exclusion from England and France of hundreds of our manufactured articles—all show which way the international trade winds may blow when the belligerents begin to take toll of their losses. Meantime, what are the facts?

Take the case of England. Thirty years ago she was the workshop of the world. From the Tyne to the Thames her factories hummed with ceaseless industry. Her goods went wherever her ships steamed, and that meant the globe. Supreme in her insularity—at once her defence and her undoing—she became infected with the virus of content. Her steel was the best steel; her wares led all the rest. "Take it or leave it!" was her selling maxim. When devices came along that saved labour and increased production she refused to scrap the old to make way for the new. Born, too, was the evil of restricted output. Moss began to grow on her vaunted industrial structure. England lagged in the trade procession.

But as she lagged the assimilative German streamed in through her hospitable door. He served his apprenticeship in British mills; took home the secrets and methods of British art and craft. He geared them to cheap labour, harnessed product to masterful distribution, and became a World Power. Before long he had annexed the dye trade; was competing with British steel; was making once-cherished British goods.

What the German did in England he duplicated elsewhere. The world of ideas was his field and, with insatiate hunger, he garnered them in. He cunningly acquired the sources of raw supply, especially the essentials to national defence; for he overlooked nothing. All was grist to his mills. He pitched his tents upon debatable trade lands. His rivals called it economic penetration, because he invariably took root. For him it was merely good business.

Then England suddenly realised that Germany had left her behind in the race for international commerce. Indifference lay at the root of this backsliding. It was easier and cheaper to buy the German-made product and reship it than to produce the same article at home. Sloth hung like a chain on English energy. What did it matter? No forest of bayonets hemmed her in; she was still Mistress of the Seas.

Meantime Germany dripped with efficiency and ached with expansion. Her amazing teamwork between state and business, stimulated by an interested finance, drove her on to a place in the sun. The shadows seemed far away when the great war crashed into civilisation. Then England woke to the folly of her blindness. The mystery of coal-tar products was shut up in a German laboratory; the secrets of tungsten, necessary to the toughest steel, were imprisoned in a Teutonic mill; and so on down a long list of products vital to industry and defence.

Even those early and tragic reverses of the war did not stir the stolid British bulk. Men fought for a chance to fight; restriction still oppressed factory output. Red tape vied with tradition to block the path of military and industrial preparation.

Then the Lion stirred; the sloth fell away; men and munitions were enlisted; the strong hand was put on labour tyranny; conscription succeeded the haphazard voluntary system. Britain got busy and she has buzzed ever since.

When the kingdom had become a huge arsenal; when the old sex differences vanished under the touchstone of a common peril; when the first khaki host swept to its place in the battle line, and the grey fleets were once more queens of the seas, England turned to the task of commercial rebuilding, once neglected, but thenceforth to be part and parcel of British purpose.

Animating this purpose, stirring it like a vast emotion, was the New Battle Cry of Empire—the kindling Creed of United Dominions, consecrated to the economic mastery of the world.

But this revival was not an overnight performance. If you know England you also know that it takes a colossal jolt to stir the British mind. The war had been in full swing for over a year and the countryside was an armed camp before the realisation of what might happen commercially after the war soaked into the average islander's consciousness.

Under the impassioned eloquence of Lloyd George the munition workers had been marshalled into an inspired working host; with the magic of Kitchener's name, the greatest of all voluntary armies came into being. But it remained for Hughes, of Australia, to point out the fresh path for the feet of the race.

Who is Hughes, of Australia? You need not ask in England, for the story of his advent, the record of his astounding triumph, the thrilling message that he left implanted in the British breast, constitute one of the miracles of a war that is one long succession of dramatic episodes. This Colonial Prime Minister arrived unknown: he left a popular hero.

Thanks to him, Australia was prepared for war; and when the Mother Lioness sent out the world call to her cubs beyond the seas there was swift response from the men of bush and range. The world knows what the Anzacs did in the Dardanelles; how they registered a monster heroism on the rocky heights of Gallipoli; gave a new glory to British arms.

England rang with their achievements. What could she do to pay tribute to their courage? Hughes was their national leader and spokesman; so the Political Powers That Be said:

"Let us invite the Premier to sit in the councils of the empire and advise us about our future trade policy."

Already Hughes had declared trade war on Germany in Australia. Under his leadership every German had been banished from commonwealth business; by a special act of Parliament the complete and well-nigh war-proof Teutonic control of the famous Broken Hill metal fields had been annulled. He stood, therefore, as a living defiance to the renewal of all commercial relations with the Central Powers. But he went further than this: He decreed trade extermination of the enemy—merciless war beyond the war.

With his first speech in England Hughes created a sensation. Before he came commercial feeling against Germany ran high. Hughes crystallised it into a definite cry. He said what eight out of every ten men in the street were thinking. His voice became the Voice of Empire. Up and down England and before cheering crowds he preached the doctrine of trade war to the death on Germany. He denounced the laxness that had permitted the "German taint to run like a cancer through the fair body of English trade"; he urged complete economic independence of the Dominions. His persistent plea was, "We must have the fruits of victory"; and those fruits, he declared, comprised all the trade that Germany had hitherto enjoyed, and as much more as could be lawfully gained.

He urged that the blood brotherhood of empire, quickened by that dramatic S.O.S. call for men across the sea and cemented by the common trench hazard, be followed by a union of empire after the war that should be self-sufficient. Behind all this eloquent talk of protection and prohibition lay the first real menace to America's new place as a world trade power. It was the opening call to arms for the war after the war.

Hughes did more than set England to thinking in imperial terms. He upset most of the calculations of the Powers That Be who invited him. They expected an amiable, able and plastic counsellor; they got an oratorical live wire, who would not be ruled, and who shocked deep-rooted free-trade convictions to the core. He helped to launch a whole new era of thought and action; and the next chapter of its progress was now to be recorded under circumstances pregnant with meaning for the whole universe of trade.

The second winter of war had passed, and with it much of the dark night that enshrouded the Allies' arms. On land and sea rained the first blows of the great assaults that were to make a summer of content for the Entente cause. Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit; victory, however distant, seemed at last assured. The time had come to prepare a new kind of drive—the combined attack upon enemy trade and any other that happened to be in the way.

Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked the Seine, in Paris. Eminent lawmakers—Hughes, of Australia, among them—were there aplenty; but few practical business men.

On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic flowed in happier and serener days. For coming generations of business everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic Conference of the Allies was about to reshape those maps and change the channels of commerce.

All the while, and less than a hundred miles away, Verdun seethed with death; still nearer brewed the storm of the Somme.

These men were assembled to fix the price of all this blood and sacrifice, and they did. In what has come to be known as the Paris Pact they bound themselves together by economic ties and pledged themselves to present a united economic front. They unfurled the banner of aggressive reprisal with the sole object of crushing the one-time business supremacy of their foes.

The chief recommendations were: To meet, by tariff discrimination, boycott or otherwise, any individual or organised trade advance of the Central Powers—already Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria have reached a commercial understanding; to forego any "favoured-nation" relation with the enemy for an indefinite period; to conserve for themselves, "before all others," their natural resources during the period of reconstruction; to make themselves independent of enemy countries in the raw materials and manufactured products essential to their economic well-being; and to facilitate this exchange by preferential trade among themselves, and by special and state subsidies to shipping, railroads and telegraphs. Another important decree prohibits the enemy from engaging in certain industries and professions, such as dyestuffs, in allied countries when these industries relate to national defence or economic independence.

In short, self-sufficiency became the aim of the whole allied group, to be achieved without the aid or consent of any other nation or group of nations, be they friends or foes.

Here, then, is the strategy that will rule after the war. A huge allied monopoly is projected—a sort of monster militant trust, with cabinets of ministers for directorates, armies and navies as trade scouts, and whole roused citizenships for salesmen.

Throughout this new Bill of World Trade Rights there is scant mention of neutrals—no reference at all to the greatest of non-belligerent nations. Yet the document is packed with interest, fraught even with highest concern, for us. Upon the ability to be translated into offensive and defensive reality will depend a large part of our future international commercial relations.

Is the Paris Pact practical? Will it withstand the logical pressure of business demand and supply when the war is ended? How will it affect American trade?

To try to get the answer I talked with many men in England and France who were intimately concerned. Some had sat in the conference; others had helped to shape its approach; still others were dedicated to its far-spreading purpose. I found an astonishing conflict of opinion. Even those who had attended this most momentous of all economic conferences were sceptical about complete results. Yet no one questioned the intent to smash enemy trade. Will our interests be pinched at the same time?

Regardless of what any European statesman may say to the contrary, one deduction of supreme significance to us arises out of the whole proposition. Summed up, it is this:

Mutual preference by or for the members of either of the great European alliances automatically creates a discrimination against those outside! Whether we face the Teuton or the Allies' group—or both—in the grand economic line-up, we shall have to fight for commercial privileges that once knew no ban.

There are two well-defined beliefs about the practical working out of the pact as a pact. Let us take the objections first. They find expression in a strong body of opinion that the whole procedure is both unhuman and uneconomic—a campaign document, as it were, conceived in the heat and passion of a great war, projected for political effect in cementing the allied lines. In short, it is what business men would call a glorified and stimulated "selling talk," framed to sell good will between the nations that now propose to carry war to shop and mill and mine.

"But," as a celebrated British economist said to me in London, "while all this talk of Economic Alliance sounds well and is serving its purpose, the fact must not be overlooked that, though war ends, business keeps right on. Self-interest will dictate the policy that pays the best." This is a typical comment.

Now we get to the meat of the matter: By the terms of the pact half a dozen important nations—to say nothing of the smaller fry—are bound to a hard-and-fast trade agreement. Business, in brief, is projected in terms of nations.

Go behind this new battle front and you will find that it conflicts with an uncompromising commercial rule. Why? Simply because, so far as business is concerned, nations may propose, but human beings dispose. Individuals, not countries, do business! Being human, these individuals are apt to follow the line of least resistance. Hence, the best-laid plans for imposing international industrial teamwork are likely to founder on those weaknesses of human nature that begin and end in the pocketbook.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and while the Peace of Versailles was being negotiated, commercial travellers of each nation, laden with samples, filled the border villages, ready to dash across the frontier and open accounts. Of course no one dreams that such history will repeat itself after the present war; but there are many persons in England and France to-day who contend that the business needs of peace will be stronger than the costly hang-over of wartime passions.

Trade, after all, is a Colossus that rests with one foot upon Necessity and the other foot upon Convenience.

Will the Allies be such valued commercial helpmates to each other? Perhaps not. When this war is over the fighting countries will be impoverished by years of drain and waste. As a result, they will be poorer customers for each other, but very sharp competitors. International trade is merely an exchange of goods for goods. You cannot sell without buying, and vice versa. No groups of nations can live by taking in each other's washing. They are bound to get outside linen. When peace comes we shall have the lending and purchasing power of the world. Can anybody afford to shut us out?

Again: Can the Allies present a united front or carry on a uniform line of conduct? Will not their interests overlap and cause an inevitable conflict, even when intentions are of the very best?

France, for example, competes with England in chemicals, surgical instruments, high-speed tools, scores of things; Russia's competitors in wheat are not Germany, but Canada, India and Australia; Italy and France are rivals for the same wine markets. Russia for years has kept down the high cost of her living by buying cheap German goods at her front door and having her projects financed by German capital. Will she face bankruptcy by going hundreds—even thousands—of miles out of her way and paying more for products? England for years has made huge profits out of the re-export of Teutonic articles, thanks to the grace of free trade and huge carrying power. Is she likely to forego all this?

In the last analysis Propinquity and the Purse are the Mothers of Trade Alliance.

Finally, will not any organised exclusion of German products, coupled with a definite and organised campaign to throttle German trade the world over, throw the business of the Kaiser's country smack into the lap of the United States? Sober reflection over these possibilities may stay economic reprisal.

On the other hand, there are many ways by which even a near translation of the economic pact into actuality may work hardship—even disaster—to American commercial interests. No matter which way we turn when peace comes we shall face the proverbial millstones in the shape of two great alliances. One is the Allied Group, jealous of our new wealth and world power, bitter with the belief that we have coined gold out of agony; the other is the Teutonic Union, smarting because of our aid to its enemies, stinging under reverses, mad with a desire to recuperate.

Examine our trade relations with warring Europe and you see how hazardous a shift in old-time relations would be. To the fighting peoples and their colonies in normal times we send nearly seventy-eight per cent of our exports, and from them we derive seventy per cent of our exports. The Allies alone, principally England and her colonies, get sixty-three per cent of these exports and send us fifty-four per cent of all we get from foreign lands.

As the National Foreign-Trade Council of the United States points out: "Any sweeping change of tariff, navigation or financial policy on the part of either group of the Allies, and particularly on the part of the Entente Allies, may seriously affect the domestic prosperity of the United States, in which foreign trade is a vital element."

Why is this foreign trade so vital? Because, during these last two years of world upheaval we have rolled up the immense favourable trade balance of over three billion dollars. In peace time this would be paid for in merchandise. But fighting Europe's industries, with the exception of a part of England's, are mobilised for munitions. Therefore, these goods have been paid for largely in gold.

This gold is now part of our basis of credit. When the war ends Europe will make every effort that ingenuity, backed up by trade resource, can devise to get that gold back. One way is through loans from us; the other is by exports to us. Now you see why we must maintain our foreign commerce.

Our huge gold reserve hides another menace: The war demands for our commodities, paid for with the yellow metal, have increased the cost of production; and it will stay up. This will lead to an unequal competition with the cheap labour markets of Europe when the war is over. Both groups of Allies will be able to undersell us.

Turn to the raw materials and you encounter a further danger in the economic pact. If the Allies develop their own sources, it will cut down our export of cotton, copper and oil. If they cannot develop sufficient sources for self-supply they may, through co-operative buying outside their dominions, satisfy their needs. In the third place, they may stimulate, through tariff or shipping concessions, or by subsidies—which are much talked of in Europe to-day—a preference for their own manufactures over American products in both allied and neutral markets.

Take navigation: England controls an immense shipping. As a matter of fact, outside the three-mile limit, she practically owns the waters of the world. If she makes lower rates for her allies, or others to whom she gives preference, where shall we be in our chronic and unpardonable dependence upon foreign bottoms? Here is where we shall pay the price for neglecting our merchant marine.

Still another menace to our trade lies in preferential alliances between Mother Countries and their colonies, which is part of the projected programme. Our next-door neighbour, Canada, has just given an illuminating instance of what may be in store for us. A Co-operative Export Association has been formed in the Dominion to get business throughout the British Empire and the other allied nations. In the circular announcing its organisation it declares that "the products of Canada will be preferred against the products of her great neutral competitor, the United States, who has stayed outside of the war and has borne no sacrifice of life and money made by the allied countries."

Return to the economic pact again and you find that it continues to bristle with dangerous possibilities for us. You will recall that one of the clauses forbids the resumption of a favoured-nation arrangement with enemy countries for a period "to be fixed by mutual agreement." This may be for an indefinite time.

Now the danger here lies in the European interpretation of the favoured-nation idea. To quote an authority: "Most of these countries have treaties under which each must grant most-favoured-nation treatment to the other; and this means that a reduction in duties granted to one country is automatically extended to all other countries with whom such treaties exist. The result is that the lowest rate in any treaty becomes, with exception, the rate extended to all countries."

We have the favoured-nation relation with many European countries, and herein lies the possible danger: The war automatically annulled all treaties between belligerents. When the day of treaty making comes again shall we suffer for the sins of friend and foe in the rearrangement of international trade and lose some precious commercial privileges? It is worth thinking about.