Читать книгу The War After the War - Isaac Frederick Marcosson - Страница 6

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Meantime, regardless of how the economic pact works out, England's policy is "Deeds, not Words," as she prepares for the time when normal life and business succeed the strain and frenzy of fighting days.

No man can range up and down the British Isles to-day without catching the thrill of a galvanic awakening, or feeling an imperial heartbeat that proclaims a people roused and alive to what the future holds and means. The kingdom is a mighty crucible out of which will emerge a new England determined to come back to her old industrial authority. It is with England that our commerce must reckon; it is English competition that will grapple with Yankee enterprise wherever the trade winds blow.

There are many reasons why. "For England," as one man has put it, "victory must mean prosperity. However triumphant she may be in arms, her future lies in a preeminence in world industries. Through it she will rise as an empire or sink to a second-rate nation."

In the second place, as all hope of indemnity fades, England realises that she will not only have to pay all her own bills but likewise some of the bills of her allies. Already her millions have been poured into the allied defence; many more must follow.

Hence, the relentless energy of her throbbing mills; the searching appraisal of her resources; the marshalling of all her genius of trade conquest. Dominating all this is the kindling idea of a self-contained empire, linked with the slogan: "Home Patronage of Home Product." The war found her unprepared to fight; she is determined that peace shall see her fit for economic battle.

This is what she is doing and every act has a meaning all its own for us. Take Industry: Forty-eight hundred government-controlled factories, working day and night, are sending out a ceaseless flood of war supplies. The old bars of restricted output are down; the old sex discrimination has faded away. Women are doing men's work, getting men's pay, making themselves useful and necessary cogs in the productive machine. They will neither quit nor lose their cunning when peace comes.

I have watched the inspiring spectacle of some of these factories, have walked through their forest of American-made automatics, heard the hum of American tools as they pounded and drilled and ground the instruments of death. What does it signify? This: that quantity output of shot and shell for war means quantity output of motors and many other products for peace. You may say that quantity output is a matter of temperament and that the British nature cannot be adapted to it; but speeded-up munitions making has proved the contrary. The British workman has learned to his profit that it pays to step lively. High war wages have accustomed him to luxuries he never enjoyed before, and he will not give them up. Unrestricted output has come to stay.

Five years ago the efficiency expert was regarded in England as an intruder and a quack; to use a stop watch on production was high crime and treason. To-day there are thousands of students of business science and factory management. In the spinning district girls in clogs sit alongside their foremen listening to lectures on how to save time and energy in work. Scores of old establishments are being reborn productively. There is the case of a famous chocolate works that before the war rebuffed an instructor in factory reorganisation. Last year it saw the light, hired an American expert, and to-day the output has been increased by twenty-five per cent.

The infant industries, growing out of the needs of war and the desire of self-sufficiency, are resting on the foundations of the new creed. "Speed up!" is the industrial cry, and with it goes a whole new scheme of national industrial education. The British youth will be taught a trade almost with his A-B-C's.

Formerly in England the standardisation of plan and product was almost unknown. For example, no matter how closely ships resembled each other in tonnage, structure or design, a separate drawing was made for each. Now on the Clyde the same specifications serve for twenty vessels. England has gone into the wholesale production; and what is true of ships in the stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary military service and the fetish of free trade.

Typical of the new methods is the standardisation of exports, which have increased steadily during the past year. In a room of the Building of the Board of Trade, down in Whitehall, and where the whole trade strategy of the war is worked out, I saw a significant diagram, streaked with purple and red lines, which shows the way it is done. The purple indicated the rosters of the great industries; the red, the number of men recruited from them for military service. No matter how the battle lines yearn for men, the workers in the factories that send goods across the sea are kept at their task. This diagram is the barometer. For exports keep up the rate of exchange and husband gold.

England is creating a whole new line of industrial defence. The manufacture of dyestuffs will illustrate: This process, which originated in England, was permitted to pass to the Germans, who practically got a world monopoly in it. Now England is determined that this and similar dependence must cease.

For dyemaking she has established a systematic co-operation among state, education and trade. In the University of Leeds a department in colour chemistry and dyeing has been established, to make researches and to give special facilities to firms entering the industry, all in the national interest. A huge, subsidised mother concern, known as British Dyes, Limited, has been formed, and it will take the place of the great dye trust of Germany, in which the government was a partner.

This procedure is being repeated in the launching of an optical-glass industry; this trade has also been in Teutonic hands. I could cite many other instances, but these will show the new spirit of British commercial enterprise and protection.

Everywhere nationalisation is the keynote of trade activity. Coal furnishes an instance: The collieries of the kingdom not only stoke the fires of myriad furnaces but drive the ships of a mighty marine. Through her control of coal England has one whip hand over her allies, for many of the French mines are in the occupied districts, and Italy's supply from Germany has stopped. Coal means life in war or peace. Now England proposes a state control of coal similar to that of railroads.

It spells fresh power over the neutral shipping that coals at British ports. If the government controls the coal it will be in a position to stipulate the use that the consumer shall make of it, and require him to call for his return cargo at specified ports. Such supervision in war may mean similar domination in peace—another bulwark for British control of the sea.

Throughout England all trade facilities are being broadened and bettered. The local Chambers of Commerce, whose chief function for years was solemnly to pass resolutions, have stirred out of their slumbers. The Birmingham body has formed a House of Commerce to stimulate and develop the commerce of the capital of the Midlands.

This stimulation at home is accompanied by a programme of trade extension abroad. The Board of Trade has granted a licence to the Latin-American Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain, formed to promote British trade in Central and South America and Mexico. Sections of the chamber are being organised for each of the important trades and industries in the kingdom, and committees named to enter into negotiations with every one of the Latin-American republics, where offices will be established in all important towns.

The Board of Trade has also learned the lesson of co-operation for foreign trade. As one result, British syndicates, composed of small manufacturers, who share the overhead cost, are forming to open up new markets the world over. These syndicates correspond with the familiar German Cartel, which did so much to plant German products wherever the sun shone.

England, too, has wiped out one other block to her trade expansion: For years many of her consuls were naturalised Germans. Many of them were trustworthy public servants. Others, true to the promptings of birth, diverted trade to their Fatherland. To-day the Consular Service is purged of Teutonic blood. It is one more evidence of the gospel of "England for the English!"

All this new trade expansion cannot be achieved without the real sinew of war, which is capital. Here, too, England is awake to the emergency. Typical of her plan of campaign is the projected British Trade Bank, which will provide facilities for oversea commercial development, and which will not conflict with the work ordinarily done by the joint-stock, colonial and British foreign banks. It will do for British foreign trade what the huge German combinations of capital did so long and so effectively for Teuton commerce. Furthermore, it will make a close corporation of finance and trade, with the government sitting in the board of directors and lending all the aid that imperial support can bestow.

The bank will be capitalised at fifty million dollars. It will not accept deposits subject to call at short notice, which means constant mobilisation of resources; it will open accounts only with those who propose to make use of its oversea machinery; it will specialise in credits for clients abroad, and it will become the centre of syndicate operations. One of its chief purposes, I might add, will be to enable the British manufacturer and exporter to assume profitably the long credits so much desired in foreign trade.

From the confidential report of its organisation let me quote one illuminating paragraph which is full of suggestion for American banking, for it shows the new idea of British preparedness for world business. Here it is:

"Nearly as important as the Board would be the General Staff. It is fair to assume that women will in the future take a considerable share in purely clerical work, and this fact will enable the institution to take fuller advantage of the qualifications of its male staff to push its affairs in every quarter of the globe. Youths should not be engaged without a language qualification, and after a few years' training they should be sent abroad. It could probably be arranged that associated banks abroad would agree to employ at each of their principal branches one of the Institution's clerks, not necessarily to remain there for an indefinite period, but to get a knowledge of the trade and characteristics of the country. Such clerks might in many cases sever their connection with the banks to which they were appointed and start in business on their own account. They would, however, probably look upon the institution as their 'Alma Mater,' Every endeavour should be made to promote esprit de corps; and where exceptional ability is developed it should be ungrudgingly rewarded. If industry is to be extended it is essential that British products should be pushed; and manufacturers, merchants and bankers must combine to push them. It is believed that this pushing could be assisted by the creation of a body of young business men in the way above described."

The scope and purpose of this British Trade Bank suggest another East India Company with all the possibilities of gold and glory which attended that romantic eighteenth-century enterprise. Perhaps another Clive or a second Hastings is somewhere in the making.

That the British Government proposes to follow the German lead and definitely go into business—thus reversing its tradition of aloofness from financial enterprise—is shown in the new British and Italian Corporation, formed to establish close economic relations between Britain and Italy. It starts a whole era in British banking, for it means the subsidising of a private undertaking out of national funds.

It embodies a meaning that goes deeper and travels much farther than this. Up to the outbreak of the great war Germany was the banker of Italy. Cities like Milan and Rome were almost completely in the grip of the Teutonic lender, and his country cashed in strong on this surest and hardest of all dominations. This was the one big reason why the Italian declaration of war against Germany was so long delayed. With this new banking corporation England not only supplants the German influence but forges the economic irons that will bind Italy to her.

The capital of the British and Italian Corporation is nominally only five million dollars. The government, however, agrees to contribute during each of the first ten years of its existence the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Though imperial stimulation of trade is one of its main objects, this institution is not without its larger political value. As this and many other similar enterprises show, politics and world trade, so far as Great Britain is concerned, will hereafter be closely interwoven.

Throughout all this British organisation runs the increasing purpose of an Empire Self-Contained. Whether that phase of the Paris Pact which calls for development and mobilisation of natural resources sees the light of reality or not, Britain is determined to take no chances for her own. She is scouring and searching the world for new fields and new supplies. She is planning to increase her tea and coffee growing in Ceylon and make cotton plantations of huge tracts in India and Africa. The control of the metal fields of Australia has reverted to her hands; she will get tungsten and oil from Burma. It took the war to make her realise that, with the exception of the United States, Cuba and Hawaii, all the sugar-cane areas of the world are within the imperial confines. They will now become part of the Empire of Self-Supply. Even a partial carrying out of this far-flung plan is bound seriously to affect our whole export business.

You have seen how this self-contained idea may work abroad. Go back to England and you find it forecasting an agricultural revolution that may be one of the after-war miracles.

For many years England has raised about twenty per cent of her wheat supplies. One reason was her dependence on grass instead of arable land; another was the inherent objection of the British farmer to adopt scientific methods of soil cultivation or engage in co-operative marketing. The old way was the best way; he wanted to go "on his own."

The war has opened his eyes, and likewise the eyes and purse of the ultimate consumer. Denmark did some of this awakening. England depended upon her for enormous supplies of bacon, cheese, butter and eggs. When the war broke out and the ring of steel hemmed Germany in, the speculative prices offered by the Fatherland were too much for the little domain. Holland also "let down" her old customer, poured her food into Germany, and fattened on immense profits. Norway and Sweden, which were also important sources of more or less perishable British food supplies, have done the same thing. When peace comes you may be sure that England will have a reckoning.

This scarcity of food, coupled with the incessant sinking of supply ships by enemy submarines, the rigid censorship of imports, and all those other factors that bring about the high cost of war, has made the Englishman sit up and take notice of his agricultural plight.

"We must grow more of our food," is the new determination. To achieve it plans for collective marketing, for intensive farming, for co-operative land-credit banks, are being made. The gentleman farmer will become a working farmer.

England's gospel of self-sufficiency has a significance for us that extends far beyond her growing independence in foodstuffs and raw materials. It is fashioning a weapon aimed straight at the heart of our overseas industrial development.

Most people who read the newspapers know that many articles of American make, ranging from bathtubs to motor cars, have been excluded from England. The reasons for this—which are all logical—are the necessity for cutting down imports to protect the trade balance and keep the gold at home; the need of ship tonnage for food and war supplies; and the campaign to curtail luxury.

Admirable as are these reasons, there is a growing feeling among Americans doing business in England that this wartime prohibition, which is part of the programme of military necessity, is the prelude to a more permanent, if less drastic, exclusion when peace comes.

Habit is strong with Englishmen, and the shrewd insular manufacturer has been quick to see the opportunities for advancement that lie in this closed-door campaign.

"Get the consumer out of the habit of using a certain American product during the war," he argues, "and when the war is over—even before—he will be a good 'prospect' for the English substitute."

Here is a concrete story that will illustrate how the exclusion works and what lies behind:

Last summer a certain well-known American machine, whose gross annual business in Great Britain alone amounts to more than half a million dollars a year, was suddenly denied entrance into the kingdom. When the managing director protested that it was a necessity in hundreds of British ships he was told that it made no difference.

"But what are the reasons for exclusion?" he asked.

"We don't want English money to go out of England," was the reply.

"Then we shall not only bank all our receipts here but will bring over one hundred thousand pounds more," came from the director.

It had no effect.

"Is it tonnage?" was the next query.

"Yes," said the official.

"Then we shall ship machines in our president's yacht," was the ready response.

This staggered the official. After a long discussion the director received permission to bring in what machines were on the way; and, also, he got a date for a second hearing.

Meantime he adapted a type of machine to the needs of a certain department in the Board of Trade, sold two, and got them installed and working before he next appeared before the Trade Censors, who, by the way, knew absolutely nothing at all about the article they were prohibiting. The first question popped to him was:

"Are machines like yours made in England?"

"Yes," replied the director; "but they have never been practical or commercial."

Then he produced the record of the machines he had sold to the government. Each one saved the labour of eight persons and considerable office space. This made a distinct impression and the company got permission to import two hundred tons of their product. But not even an application for more can be filed until the first of next year. Only the dire necessity for this article, coupled with the fact that it is without British competition, got it over.

I cite this incident to show what many Americans in England believe to be one of the real reasons behind the prohibition, which, summed up, is simply this: England is trying to keep out everything that competes with anything that is made in England or that can be made in England!

For some time after the war began our motor cars went in free. Then followed an ad-valorem duty of thirty-three and a third per cent. Despite this handicap, agents were able to sell American machines, which were both popular and serviceable. The tariff was imposed ostensibly to cut down imports, but mainly to please the British motor manufacturers, who claimed that the surrender of their factories to the government for making munitions left the automobile market at the mercy of the American product, which meant loss of goodwill.

Subsequently a complete embargo was placed on the entry of American pleasure cars and the business practically came to a standstill. What is the result? Let the agent of a well-known popular-priced American car tell his story.

"Before the war and up to the time of the embargo," he said, "I was selling a good many American automobiles. With the embargo on cars also came a prohibition of spare parts. It was absolutely impossible to get any into the country. Many of my customers wanted replacements, and, when I could not furnish them, they abandoned the cars I sold them and bought English-made machines whose parts could be replaced."

All through the motor business in England I found a strong disposition on the part of the British manufacturer and dealer to create a market for his own car as soon as the war is over. Some even talked of a large output of low-priced machines to meet the competition of the familiar car that put the automobile joke on the map. The only American comeback to this growing prejudice is to build factories or assembling plants within the British Isles. This will save excessive freight rates, keep down the costly-tariff "overhead," and get the benefit of all the goodwill accruing from the employment of British labour.

A by-product of British exclusion is the inauguration of a Made-in-England campaign. Buy a hat in Regent Street or Oxford Street and you see stamped on the inside band the words, "British Manufacture." This English crusade is more likely to succeed than our Made-in-U.S.A. attempt, for the simple reason that the government is squarely behind it.

This same spirit dominates newspaper publicity. You find a British fountain pen glowingly proclaimed in a big display advertisement, illustrated with the picture of men trundling boxes of gold down to a waiting steamer. Alongside are these words:

"The man who buys a foreign-made fountain pen is paying away gold, even if the money he hands across the counter is a Treasury note. The British shop may get the paper; the foreign manufacturer gets gold for all the pens he sends over here. What is the sense of carrying an empty sovereign-purse in one pocket if you put a foreign-made fountain pen in another?"

Behind all this British exclusion is an old prejudice against our wares. There has never been any secret about it. I found a large body of opinion headed by brilliant men who have bidden farewell to the Hands-Across-the-Sea sentiment; who have little faith in the theory that blood is thicker than water when it comes to a keen commercial clash.

What of the human element behind the whole British awakening? Will organised labour, an ancient sore on the British body, rise up and complicate these well-laid schemes for economic expansion? As with the question of practicability of the Paris Pact, there is a wide difference of opinion.

On one hand, you find the air full of the menace of post-war unemployment and the problem of replacing the woman worker by the man who went away to fight. To offset this, however, there will be the undoubted scarcity of male help due to battle or disease, and the inevitable emigration of the soldier, desirous of a free and open life, to the Colonies.

On the other hand, there is the conviction that unrestricted output, having registered its golden returns, will be the rule, not the exception, among the English artisans. England's frenzied desire for economic authority proclaims a job for everybody.

I asked a member of the British Cabinet, a man perhaps better qualified than any other in England to speak on this subject, to sum up the whole after-war labour situation, as he saw it, and his epigrammatic reply was:

"After the war capital will be ungrudging in its remuneration to labour; and labour, in turn, must be ungrudging in its output."

No one doubts that after the war the British worker will have his full share of profits. As one large manufacturer told me: "We have so gotten into the habit of turning our profits over to the government that it will be easy to divide with our employees." Here may be the panacea for the whole English labour ill.

But, whatever may be the readjustment of this labour problem, one thing is certain: Peace will find a disciplined England. The five million men, trained to military service, will dominate the new English life; and this means that it will be orderly and productive.

With this discipline will come a democracy—social and industrial—such as England has never known. The comradeship between peer and valet, master and man, born of common danger under fire, will find renewal, in part at least, when they go back to their respective tasks. This wiping out of caste in shop, mill and counting room will likewise remove one of the old barriers to the larger prosperity.

England wants the closest trade relations with her Dominions. But will the Colonies accept the idea of a fiscal union of empire, which practically means intercolonial free trade? Or will they want to protect their own industries, even against the Mother Country? Like the French, they are willing to risk life and limb for a cause, but they likewise want to guard jealously their purse and products. They have not forgotten the click when Churchill locked the home door against them.

This leads to the question that is agitating all England: Will peace bring tariff reform? Both English and American economic destiny will be affected by the decision, whatever it may be.

Canvass England and you encounter a widespread movement that means, as the advocates see it, a broadening of the home market; security for the infant "key" industries; a safeguard for British labour—in short, the end of the old inequality of a Free England against a Protected Germany.

Protection in England, hitched to a world-wide freeze-out business campaign against Germany, would doubtless divert a whole new international discount business to New York. German exporters under these circumstances might refuse payments from their other customers on London, demanding bills on New York instead. To hold this business, however, we should need direct banking and cable connections with all the grand divisions of trade, adequate sea-carrying power, dollar credits, and a government friendly to business.

Then, there is the middle English ground which demands a "tariff for revenue only," and subsidy—not protection—for the new industries.

Combating all this is the dyed-in-the-bone free trader, who points to the fact that free trade made England the richest of the Allies and gave her control of the sea. "How can a nation that is one huge seaport, and which lives by foreign trade, ever be a protectionist?" he asks.

If he has his way we shall have to struggle harder for our share of universal business. More than this, it will block what is likely to be one of Germany's schemes for rehabilitation. Here is the possible procedure:

Germany's financial position after the war will be badly strained. She can be saved only by an effective export policy. To do this she must seek all possible neutral markets; and to get them quickly she will offer broad—even extravagant—reciprocity programmes. They may conflict with the proposed Franco-British programmes of protection and embargo against neutral trade interests.

But if the Franco-British programme leaves the allied markets for goods and money open, as before the war, the German reciprocity scheme will fail of its effect by the sheer force of natural competition. Hence England can throttle the re-establishment of German credit by a free and liberal trade policy, open to all the world. Though poor, after the war she can actually be stronger, in view of her great army and navy, her new individual efficiency, and renewed commercial vitality.

Will all this keep Germany out? There are many people, even in England, who think not. Already Germans by the thousands are becoming naturalised citizens of Holland, Spain, Switzerland and Denmark; building factories there and shipping the product into the enemy strongholds, stamped with neutral names. Much of the "Swiss" chocolate you buy in Paris was made by Teutonic hands.

A French manufacturer who bought a grinding machine in Zurich the other day thought it looked familiar; and when he compared it with a picture in a German catalogue he found it was the identical article, made in Germany, which had been offered to him by a Frankfort firm six months before the war began. Only certificates of origin will bar out the German product.

Amid the hatred that the war has engendered, England wonders at the price she will pay for German exclusion. Men like Sir John Simon solemnly assert in Parliament: "In proportion as we divert German trade after the war we throw the trade of the Central European Powers more and more into the hands of America, with the result that, unhappily, if we became involved in another European war we should not be able to count on the friendly neutrality which America has shown in this war." Others inquire: "What of the future trade of India, the great part of whose cotton crop before the war went to Central Europe?"

Sober-minded and farseeing men, in England and elsewhere, believe that, despite the ravage of her men and trade, Germany will come back commercially.

"You must not forget," said one of them, "that, no matter how badly she is beaten, Germany will still be a going business concern. She will have an immense plant; her genius of efficiency and organisation cannot be killed. Through her magnificent industrial education system she has trained millions of boys to take the vacant stools and stands in shop and mill. England and France have no such reserves. Besides, if we pauperise Germany, no one—not even Belgium—will get a pound of indemnity."

You have now seen the moving picture of half a world in process of significant change, wrought by clash of arms, and facing a complete economic readjustment with peace. Whether the Paris Pact is practical or visionary, no matter if England is free trade or protectionist, regardless of Germany's ability to find herself industrially at once, one thing we do know—the end of the war will find the Empire of World Trade molten and in the remaking.

Fresh paths must be shaped; the race will be to the best-prepared. Whatever our position, be it neutral or belligerent—and no man can tell which now—we shall face a supreme test of our resource and our readiness. What can we do to meet this crisis, which will mean continued prosperity or costly reaction?

Many things; but they must be done now, when immunity from actual conflict gives us a merciful leeway. More than ever before, we shall face united business fronts. Therefore, co-operation among competitors is necessary to a successful foreign trade.

Since the coming trade war will rage round tariffs, it will be well to heed the resolution recently adopted by the National Foreign-Trade Council: "That the American tariff system, whatever be its underlying principle, shall possess adequate resources for the encouragement of the foreign trade of the United States by commercial treaties or agreements, or executive concessions within defined limits, and for its protection from undue discrimination in the markets of the world." In short, we must have a flexible and bargaining tariff.

We must train our men for foreign-trade fields; they must know alien languages as well as needs; we must perfect processes of packing that will deliver goods intact. With these goods, we must sell goodwill through service and contact. Secondhand-business getting will have no place in the new rivalry.

Our money, too, must go adventuring, and courage must combine with capital. Our dawning international banking system, which first saw the light in South America, needs world-wide expansion. Dollar credit will be a world necessity if we capitalise the opportunity that peace may bring us. No financial aid should be so welcome as ours, because it is nonpolitical.

This trade machinery will be inadequate if we have no merchant marine. Chronic failure to heed the warning for a national shipping will make our dependence upon foreign holds both acute and costly.

Our trade needs more than a government professedly friendly to business. It requires a definite co-operation with business. An advisory board of practical men of commercial affairs would be of more constructive benefit to the country than all the lawmakers combined.

Here, then, is the protection against organised European economic aggression, the armour for the inevitable trade conflict. Unless we gird it on, we shall be onlookers instead of participants.