Part 8

The significance of trade has fundamentally changed in our time. What was a private adventure has become a national necessity, vital to the existing form of the principal industrial states of the world. And yet that first rude theory of it, representing the step from piracy to commerce, universally survives. This, at last, is the crucial fact.

It has been impossible to part with the notion that there must be gain in trade—a profit on one side beyond the mutual satisfaction of unlike wants with unlike goods. Hence the term, balance of trade, meaning the balance in your favour, or against you, from the transactions of commerce. The rule is that the industrial nations come out each year with a balance in their favour. The countries with whom they have been exchanging machine-made goods for food and raw materials owe them money. This simply means that the industrial nations charge more for what they sell than they pay for what they buy. Hence the gain. That is how they get rich. It is more than a rule: it is the very principle of trade; and if you say there is any other principle the commercial mind becomes instantly stark. What would activate trade if not the hope of gain?

Nevertheless, trade on that principle is bound to fail, as piracy failed, and for the same practical reason. On a vast scale, with unlimited participation, it is not continuously feasible. Every nation cannot have a favourable trade-balance. So long as three or four nations had a monopoly of machines and machine-craft, it could be managed; it could even assume such colossal proportions as to create the illusion of being permanent as the way of the world. That monopoly is broken. The machine is increasingly a common possession. Its power is dispersed, and there is much new and unbidden ecstasy in the exercise of it. And whereas it was that a few nations exploited many, what now opens to view is the prospect of all nations simultaneously engaged in the effort to exploit one another. Every frontier a trade wall. Each nation forbidding others to do unto it that which it is bent upon doing to them. So we return to the middle of the sixteenth century, no wiser than the British were when the Parliament voted An Act Avoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made by Handicraftsmen Beyond the Seas (5 Eliz. c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 428-429), 1562. It reads:

Whereas heretofore the artificers of this realm of England (as well within the city of London as within other cities, towns, and boroughs of the same real) that is to wit, girdlers, cutlers, saddlers, glovers, point-makers, and such like handicraftsmen, have been in the said faculties greatly wrought, and greatly set on work, as well for the sustentation of themselves, their wives, and families, as for a good education of a great part of the youth of this realm in good art and laudible exercise:

Yet notwithstanding so now it is, that by reason of the abundance of foreign wares brought into this realm from the parts of beyond the seas, the said artificers are not only less occupied, and thereby utterly impoverished, the youth not trained in the said sciences and exercises, and thereby the said faculties and the exquisite knowledges thereof like in short time within this realm to decay; but also divers cities and towns within this realm of England much thereby impaired, the whole realm greatly endamaged and other countries greatly enriched.

For reformation whereof, be it enacted by our sovereign lady the Queen’s Highness, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of this present parliament assembled and by the authority of the same, that no person or persons whatsoever, from or after the feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist now next ensuing, shall bring or cause to be brought into this realm of England from the parts of beyond the seas, any girdles, harness for girdles, rapiers, daggers, knives, hilts, pummels, lockets, chapes, dagger-blades, handles, scabbards, and sheaths for knives, saddles, horseharness, stirrups, bits, gloves, points, leather laces, or pins, being ready made or wrought in any parts of beyond the seas, to be sold, bartered, or exchanged within this realm of England or Wales; upon pain to forfeit all such wares so to be brought contrary to the true meaning of this act, in whose hands soever they or any of them shall be found, on the very value thereof.

Shall it be either this again, or from a universal war of machine-competition the survival of one titanic industrial nation with a monopoly of foreign trade and the might to force its surplus goods on other people’s markets? That nation would fall in time and not altogether from its own weight. It would, of course, abuse its power; but, moreover, it would be unable to collect its favourable trade-balances from all the rest of the world.

Logical extremes are fictions of thought. It is always another thing that happens. The one impossibility is for trade to wear in its present character. It has come to the end of its theory, witness the dread with which European statesmen, economists, and industrialists regard the payment of German reparations. How shall Germany pay? In goods. There is no other way. She cannot pay in gold. There is not that much gold in the whole world. The Allied creditors actually lend her a little gold in order that she may recover from her amazing act of bankruptcy and get back to the way of producing exportable wealth. But to whom shall she deliver her goods, or sell them? Great Britain does not want them. Her anxiety is how to keep her own factories going. They make the same goods. France does not wish them, nor Belgium, nor Italy, nor the United States, and all for the same reason. They have a potential surplus of industrial commodities from their own machines. Then shall Germany sell her goods in other markets and turn the money proceeds over to Great Britain, France, et al? But they themselves need those other markets on which to sell their own industrial products. German competition is not wanted there. Thus an impasse.

If, in desperation, the Allied creditors forgave Germany her reparation debt, or so much of it as she should be obliged to pay in competitive goods, that would be still worse. For Germany would then compete in those other markets on her own initiative and keep the profit. And all the time those other markets, in Asia, Africa, South America, tend to become less and less exploitable because they belong to people who have begun to found industries of their own and are in the way to be natively supplied with manufactures.

VII

DIM VISTAS NEW

It must occur to you that what the world requires to find is a new conception of commerce among nations—one that shall be free of the predatory impulse, above the exploiting motive, competitive in some nobler sense. It need not be magnanimous or unselfish—not yet; but only enlightened enough to comprehend the latter meaning of events.

For a superseding principle the perfect pattern is represented in nature, where you see dissimilar organisms existing together in a state of symbiosis, one sustaining the other, vitally interdependent, yet neither exploiting the other.

There is no accrual of advantage to one side, no gain, no favourable balance of trade. One gives exactly as much as it receives and two wants are equally satisfied, with nothing to boot either way.

This is very different from parasitism, which is one-sided, for gain only. And there is a very curious suggestion that organisms now existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once parasitic and learned better.

It cannot be supposed that nations will ever deliberately substitute a principle of mutualism for the principle of gain in trade. They could not if they would. Those that have the advantage must fight for it to the end. Commerce itself, if you look to it, is a complex structure of growth for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It cannot change its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It has instead a vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with necessity and circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed ideally by mass intelligence. The conglomerate mind is irresponsibly, impersonally selfish; it cannot act without experience. There is no experience of peoples sustaining one another on a sympathetic plan, each willing to give as much as it takes, with no balance favourable or unfavourable to be settled in gold or debt. This has never happened. It is an idea only.

But if now we move our point of view from the centre to the circumference, we shall see already taking place, with the force of natural events, momentous alterations in the scheme of economic life—one of decay and one of revaluation.

We witness almost unawares the ruin of that classic enterprise of empire which is founded upon the theory of a balance of trade and a division of labour whereby the colonies, the dominions, the subject and mandated peoples are hewers, drawers, and food-bringers, serving those who live in cities, practise machine-craft, and think themselves wholly benevolent.

The machine has betrayed it. Nothing more unexpected has occurred since the discovery of a simple chemical reaction that was to destroy the privileged warrior-caste among mankind. When a splendid knight in armour was powerless against the peasant with a musket and a knight with a musket no better than a peasant, the romantic profession of arms was doomed. Gunpowder ended the age of chivalry. Ultimate military power passed to the people.

And now for hundreds of millions of people hitherto inferior in status the machine is a symbol of liberation, freedom, independence, recognition, racial power. Japan is the thrilling example in Asia. Did it not deliver her from a thraldom imposed by the Western Powers in the interest of their own trade? Did it not make her in one generation their equal, a nation to be feared? Certainly for these reasons use and possession of the machine will increase in the world beyond any natural economic ratio, and both the power and profit of empire will cease.

The other alteration, already beginning to be visible though not yet adequately understood, is a change in the value of food. Three causes henceforth will be operating together to make food dear. First, as cities continue to grow and the industrial population of the earth continues to augment faster than the agricultural population, the need to import food will be always greater; second, the exportable surplus of food will be always less because as the agricultural and low-craft nations progress toward their ideal of industrial independence they will consume more and more of their own food products; and third, the supply of those industrial commodities that are exchanged for food will enormously increase.

In the language of the economist, the agricultural index will rise and the industrial index will fall. It will require a greater quantity of manufactures to buy a bushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheat to buy a manufactured article. This will not be for one year or two. It will be lasting. It will affect the status of great groups and classes of people. In the cities and industrial centres the cost of living will move in a vertical manner.

The difficulties of food-importing countries may, almost certainly will, become desperate. The people of Great Britain, for example, will pay dearly for the wealth they have amassed by industry in the last seventy-five years. If the value of food, priced in British machine-wares, should double, then for the same quantity of food as before they would have to give twice the quantity of manufactured goods, which would mean twice as much labour and no more to eat. The same difficulties will beset all countries not self-contained in food. They will exhort their people to return to the fields, which the people will be loth to do, having tasted cities. They will expect their governments to make food cheaper by edict, or to buy it out of taxation and distribute it gratis. Moreover, in some countries, taking again the case of Great Britain as notable, there may not be enough land. The people perhaps could not feed themselves no matter how intensively they worked their fields, industry having multiplied the population beyond the utmost potentiality of a native food supply. Obviously indicated is a movement of dispersal together with a limitation upon the increase of industrial population. More power will pass to countries, like the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, that have the advantage of enormous food-reserves. Their problems will be internal.

None of this can happen without much blind and violent resistance. But, of course, it will not happen all at once, not all in one place, nor in every case with a clear meaning. And it is not certain that any amount of experience, however painful, will bring nations to adopt what we have called a symbiotic principle of commerce with one another. There is at first the danger that agriculture in its turn will exploit industry as industry has exploited peasantry and that those who possess or control resources of food and raw materials will hold them too dear, thereby taking the industrial nations into their debt or provoking them to insane measures.

Thus the opportunity to go forward might be lost in passion. The fate of retrogression is possible. This has happened many times. It is much less probable than ever before, however, for many reasons that seem permanent. When knowledge was a precious torch borne aloft by a few hands through storm and stress, it was easily quenched. Then darkness. You can hardly imagine destruction of the existing body of science, technology, and fact-knowledge. The mass of it is too great to be lost.

That, of course, has nothing to do with wisdom. By knowledge alone man might extinguish himself utterly. But to suppose that he will not find a new way to go on with, that he will either move the old struggle to new ground or return to medievalism, is to believe there is no law of human progress.

The probability is that he will find the way unknowingly, by groping, and will be well upon it before he has had time to formulate any clear idea or theory of what he is doing. He will have found little by little that it pays, better than any other way, not as he once understood profit, but in terms of enduring satisfactions, which may include peace. Critical understanding of it will come later with reflection, and as it comes he will rid his mind of the phantasy in pursuit of which he has made the world so much richer in things than in happiness.

Seeing now only how relentlessly the curse pursued him still and how the affliction of monotonous toil if it be lifted in one place is made heavier in another, he is torn with a sense of frustration. But the view is wrong—false to his first nature. He forgets the truth of his own myth. Somewhere down the ages it got turned upside down. Once he dwelt in the Garden of Eden, or supposed he did, and cared not for it. He was bored there and beguiled to his fall. The figure at the gate forbidding his return is a symbol of self-knowledge; it was set there by his own forethought, lest he should be tempted to go back.