A Tale of Two Pigs

— Tweedledee, in Through the Looking-glass

IT has not escaped the revisionists that the pig figures among the war guilty. Not the whole realm of pigdom, but a particular pig — to be precise, the porcus Serbianus.

In pre-war days this Serbian member of the species led Serbia by the nose. It thrust her into foreign trade; it started her on the path of industrialization. The one led to ill feeling with Austria-Hungary so intense that it attained the dimensions of a pig war. Both of them combined to promote a national spirit which asserted itself vigorously against the pretensions of Vienna. Serbian swine were thus artificers of Serajevo as well as Serbia.

Not only was Serbia’s agricultural economy dominated by pigs, but pigs were the peasant’s ‘cash crop.’ Dean Swift’s famous specific for correcting the evil of excessive fertility among the poor — namely, to kill the babies for food — could not apply in the case of Serbian pigs, for the digestive system, slow in any case to dispose of pork, would rebel at too much pork. The peasant had to live on pigs by getting rid of them through exchange for other commodities. But — exchange with whom? Since his neighbor also raised pigs, and since these also constituted his surplus, there was no point in exchanging pigs for pigs. That would have been the porcine equivalent of taking in each other’s washing. The way out was in trade across the frontier, and this meant with Austria-Hungary, for Cuba is no less dependent on the United States than Serbia was on Austria-Hungary. Serbia had no seaboard and was far removed from the nearest export harbors at Galatz, Salonika, and Fiume; Turkey to the south was Mohammedan, and therefore had a complex about pigs; Bulgaria to the east was under Ottoman suzerainty, and by no means friendly to the Serbs. So, as pigs grew and flourished in Serbia, they began to flow in legions across the River Save into Hungary, and, by grace of the Austrian railroad system, to markets beyond.

I

Hungary had both a plenitude of pigs and a pig problem. The green maize of the rich Hungarian plain nourishes live stock in abundance. To this anyone who has slithered through Hungarian mud, trying to dodge Hungarian hogs, will bear witness. The Hungarian peasant was therefore full of wrath when he saw the porkers of Serbia invading his domain. He was as angry as are our American manufacturers when foreign competition threatens to rob them of American customers. Your preserve is your perquisite; the other fellow’s yours if you can get it. So the Hungarians said: ‘These Serbs are taking the bread out of our mouths. Whoso buys a pig in Austria-Hungary must buy a homebred pig from Hungary. That is right. It is reasonable. It is patriotic.’ The farmers had a voice as well as a stake in the country. Their interests were well looked after by the Hungarian diet at Budapest, whose pressure on Vienna, the conductor of the foreign relations of the Dual Monarchy, resulted in the imposition of prohibitory tariffs on Serbian pigs. No longer could the pigs go to market. The pig war was on.

On the other side of the Save the object of this warfare continued willynilly to multiply and increase. Acornfattened in the vast Serbian forests, progeny poured down to the lowlands for winter disposal. They had to be taken care of while Magyar antiporcine eloquence reverberated through the halls of Congress. A hemmed-in Serbia had somehow to expel, or, as Charles Lamb would have said, to extradomiciliate, them. The Serbs solved the problem by cutting the Gordian knot that bound them to AustriaHungary.

This daring move was the work of King Peter, who came to the Serb throne in 1903. It was meet that he should become the porker’s patron, for he was of the House of Karageorgevich, the ‘Black Georges,’ whose founder was a swineherd. Two years after his accession Belgrade signed a treaty ushering in a customs union with Bulgaria. It marked Serbia’s release from the swaddling clothes of Austro-Hungarian economic subjection. Battalions of penned-in pigs began to debouch on to the hospitable plains of Bulgaria with the blind unknowing eagerness of the Gadarene swine. They flocked through the Bulgar ports on the Black Sea to oversea abattoirs.

Vienna raged, but Mr. Pashich and his ministers, backed by the imperturbable Peter, stood firm, while the records mark no diminution in Bulgar activity in turning Serb pig into pork, or as pig brokers. The treaty encouraged Serbia to make further excursions into foreign diplomacy. Another trail through a commercial agreement was marked out to Italy. Even France, faced with a growing demand for the gustable cotelette de pore frais, did not disdain the virtues of Serbian pig, and signed an accord permitting importations.

The relief of pig pressure at home resulted in a prestige abroad which built up Serbia’s international stature. For the trade had an income at its hoofs and with it the Belgrade treasury was enabled to establish foreign credits for the purpose of buying munitions and developing a military equipment ready for Der Tag.

In blazing these new trails the Serb pigs had not forgotten the path across the Save. Trade is related to the instinct of self-preservation and cannot be stopped by fiat. The Serb-Austrian break did not deter the progress of the Serb pigs to the Austro-Hungarian market. But it was no longer an easy route. The anti-Serb agrarian policy of Hungary now had full rein. It was aimed at repelling all meat importations into Austria-Hungary, particularly from Serbia. The Magyars recked little that the rapidly developing urbanization of Austria-Hungary had brought on a meat shortage. Austria chanted with Hungary, Die Serben, das sind Schweine! but you most often rail at the man you are dependent upon, and Austrian city needs overcame political antipathies.

Austria wanted pigs which the Hungarian sties could not supply. They wanted other meat of which the Argentine seemed the logical purveyor. But the Hungarians said, ‘If we cannot supply enough, then you must starve.’ We should nowadays call the Hungarian attitude a protest against ‘ social dumping.’ National passions are easily aroused by the competition in the home market of a neighbor possessing a lower standard of life. The cities, however, did not choose to starve in the interests of economic nationalism. They started a vigorous anti-agrarian campaign which dominated internal politics till 1911. The pig war put on a frat ricidal aspect.

Austrian connivance encouraged Serb ingenuity to elude the sharp eyes of the Hungarian gendarmerie, ever watchful on the left bank of the Save. At dead of night decoy boats containing a few puling porkers would be floated over. Immediately a hue and cry would be raised. The gendarmes would be attracted from their scattered posts, and, while they fumed over their prize, boatload after boatload of fat and struggling swine would be rowed across at the temporarily unguarded points. It was a game as rich in adventure, if not as profitable, as rum running.

II

There was a brief official renewal of intercourse in 1908. In that year Austria and Serbia came to an agreement. One of the provisions read, ‘Importation of live stock from Serbia is prohibited.’ This was necessary, it was declared, to safeguard Austria-Hungary from the distemper which the noxious pigs would inevitably bring. In these more scientific days the Economic Committee of the League of Nations would have labeled the practice a form of ‘administrative protection.’ Administrative protection is any extra-tariff enactment which gains the same end as a prohibitory tariff — namely, keeps goods out. A recent example was the Mexican order that the formulas of French perfumery should be pasted on all bottles imported into Mexico. Another was the American order which decreed that Dutch tulip bulbs were contaminated. The Austrian order was in the same category. As a sop to Serb susceptibilities, the ordinance allowed limited importations of slaughtered hogs.

Serbia renewed intercourse with her tongue in her check. She knew that a writ of paper emanating from a foreign office could not stem the avalanche of live pigs which the Serb peasant was nightly propelling across the Save. Relations were so exacerbated that the agreement amounted only to a breathing spell in diplomatic warfare. The events that upset it were the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the declaration of Bulgarian independence — events of sufficient magnitude to cause flurries of concern in all the European chancelleries. The frontier with Austria-Hungary now drew around Serbia’s western flank. Gone seemed the dream of union with Bosnia and Herzegovina — the ‘great Serbian idea.’ The Serb people clamored for war, but the Great Powers were lukewarm, and the storm blew over, leaving Serbia with the feeling that her cause had been deserted by her Russian patron and brother Slav. Serbia had now more or less to fend for herself. Fending meant growing, growing involved nation building, and nation building implied the extension of pig markets. She developed trade down the Danube to Braila and Constantza, along the Bulgarian railroad to the Black Sea, and over the Orient railway to Salonika. At these termini Greek, Rumanian, and Italian ships distributed Serbian pigs far and wide.

Dispersion so far from home caused many of the long-suffering hogs to die before they reached their destination. They became the martyrs of industrialization. Modern factories sprang up to turn the hogs into pork, sausages, and lard. Little Serbia, like our Chicago packers, began to ‘live off the squeal as well as the hoof,’ and the squeal carved out wider areas of Serbian influence.

In 1911 Austro-Serb treaty relations were reestablished, but the agreement remained only a gesture, for it once more prohibited the importation of live hogs. Other regulations impeded the trade in slaughtered pigs. So sensitive was Hungarian policy toward the Serbian pig that one article provided for the slaughter of any pigs destined for Austria-Hungary under the supervision of Austro-Hungarian veterinarians. Yet another article assuaged Hungarian sentiment by providing that the carcasses might only be sent to cities where the demand for meat was particularly pressing and then only in sealed cars. Apparently there was a danger, in Hungarian eyes, of a leakage even of dead hogs. The treaty was not calculated to heal the old animosities, the extent of which was revealed at Serajevo, when a fanatical pro-Serb student lit the torch that plunged half the world in cataclysmic strife.

III

The porcus Serbianus is no longer lord of the Serb economy. Is this due to the casualties of war? Mr. Hoover’s Relief Commission thought so. They sent shipload after shipload of canned pork to Salonika for distribution in southern Serbia. Far be it from me to deny the war contribution as well as the war guiltiness of the Serbian pig. But I cannot accept Mr. Hoover’s explanation of its decline. (Neither could the Serbs, for that matter; it seemed to them that sending pigs to Serbia was like sending beer to Munich.) Perhaps its migratory, not to say its imperialist, tendencies have been quieted by the translation of Serbia into Yugoslavia. The reason may perhaps be the more prosaic one that it has been dethroned by other elements in a more diversified agriculture and husbandry. Or perhaps it is only that its political stamping ground has shifted.

I suspect the last. For the characteristics of the porcus Serbianus seem to have been taken over by the porcus Polonianus. The Polish pig is just as full of Wanderlust, if not as wild, as its Serbian cousin.

It was once said that the greatest danger to England lay in the fecundity of the Slav woman. Fecundity of course is not enough. It is the use that is made of progeny. In the case of the little Slavs, they were potential challengers to Britain’s spread-eagled empire. In the case of Polish pigs, their litters are issuing out of Poland to stake out markets hitherto considered the prerogative, because the preserve, of the indigenous. They are choking a score of trade routes. They are plaguing a dozen chancelleries.

I ran into the problem first of all at Geneva, where the members of the Economic Committee of the League of Nations periodically foregather to consider the world’s economic ills. They are particularly concerned with the smoothing of commercial intercourse. On the day I arrived they were discussing customs nomenclature. How could they standardize their diversified schedules?

Difficulties over customs classifications are not the least of the obstacles besetting international trade. Particularly is trouble caused over the rarities and miscellanea of commerce. The mummy of an Egyptian Pharaoh was once classified as dried codfish by a bewildered customs inspectorate, and duty was paid on it as dried codfish. Signor Pirelli tells us that false teeth are grouped with field glasses and microscopes in one country and with trunks in another. At one frontier fuel peat is listed with truffles while at another it is covered by art works and pencils.

If these inconsistencies were ironed out, not only would trade be expedited, but international relations would be improved. One can imagine the feeling aroused in Egypt over the designation of Imperial Pharaoh as dried codfish. Sardines from the United States are similarly mistreated in nomenclature for the purpose of tariff assessment at maximum rates. One can appreciate the sentiment of our own Pacific Coast when the ancestry of 100 per cent American sardines is so impugned.

To this important task of bringing uniformity out of chaos the delegates to the Economic Committee are applying themselves. When I arrived they had ploughed alphabetically through the body of customs classifications up to ‘p — pigs.’ ‘Pigs’ seemed easy. At least, so the chairman thought. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in announcing ‘p — pigs,’ ‘I don’t think there is any difficulty here. Pigs are quite definitely and knowably pigs. I think the nomenclature is standard, is it not? If it is, I think we might safely pass on to the next item. Do you agree, gentlemen ? ’

‘No,’ protested the Polish delegate. ‘Pigs are so important in the trade of my country that in our schedule we have divided them into two main categories, lean pigs and fat pigs.’

And so I left them, with their toes stubbed on ‘p—pigs,’ wondering how to bring Polish porkers into a pattern of trading uniformity.

Pondering on the importance of pigs to Poland, I went to Vienna, where I had an appointment with the editor of a well-known Austrian newspaper. The editor was full of praise of Monsignor Seipel. ‘If we had had him as chancellor in pre-war days,’ he said, in a burst of enthusiasm, ‘the World War, and the break-up of AustriaHungary, might have been spared us.’

I was invited to look at his record as meriting my admiration. It was amply illustrative of industry and conscientious service.

‘Just to show you how seriously he takes his duties,’ said the editor, ‘you will be interested to know what he is doing now. Austria’s relations with Poland are seriously disturbed. In fact, you have come to us at quite a critical time. They sent us two hundred and fifty thousand more live hogs last year than they did the year before. These excessive importations have aroused lively protests from our agricultural classes. Of late years they have been speeding up their husbandry. But it is being throttled by these Polish pigs. You will see the situation is very delicate.’

He paused, and I hastily agreed, but, recalling Austria’s pre-war porkless status, I asked for more information about the nascent pig industry. Apparently Austria no longer suffered from pig-barrenness. Pigs were so profuse, in fact, that the agrarian folk, like the pre-war Hungarian, were crying aloud for protection against all incomers.

‘So urgent is our problem,’ the editor continued, after this interruption, ‘ that Monsignor Seipel has thought it advisable to take it upon himself. And he has been engaged on it for many weeks past. It is a dilemma. He has to pacify our farmers. That can come only by limiting Polish importations. Yet we cannot raise the tariff because of treaty stipulations. And we cannot take any extra-tariff measures because they would tread too violently on Polish toes.’

‘What will he do?’ I asked, impressed.

‘That I cannot tell you,’ was the reply. ‘He is a skillful diplomat and he is hoping to secure a kind of gentlemen’s agreement restraining the pig invasion. If any man can do it, it is Seipel.’

I had come to Vienna hopeful of a talk with the Chancellor, but to all inquiries I was told that the Polish negotiations demanded his whole attention. They were too important to be left to subordinates. So I left Vienna to its problem of how most delicately to stem the invasion of Polish pigs.

Berlin was my next call, and a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Reichstag my next appointment. He had six months before told me that in the list of Germany’s foreign troubles the question of the Rhineland ranked second to that of the eastern frontier. I wondered whether anything had happened in the meantime to make him change the order.

‘No,’ he said, ‘our eastern relations are worse, if anything. Fighting tariffs and import prohibitions is still the rule in our unregulated relations with Poland. A commercial treaty seems as far off as ever.’

We were seated in the gallery, looking down on the parliamentarians below; they had just returned from a division on some financial measure. My interlocutor waited until the voting had been announced, and then resumed. ‘I cannot see any hope just yet. The Rhineland seems to be in process of settlement, but Poland’ — and he shrugged his shoulders despairingly. ‘Negotiations, you know, are now being taken care of by Dr. Stresemann personally. The reason is that they are concerned with ’ — and he dropped into a whisper — ‘Polish pigs.’

Germany with this problem too! I smiled. ‘You may smile,’ he rebuked me, ‘ but you would n’t if you realized how important these things are to us. You in your country are n’t afflicted with close neighbors. Your farmers are n’t on the ragged edge of things. In Silesia our peasants raise their own pigs and naturally expect to market them in their own country. Germany is reputed to have the greatest number of pigs per square mile of all of the larger states. And they are mostly concentrated in our eastern and northeastern territory. And yet Polish pigs are flocking across the border, and eating into that market. This in spite of our bad relations with the Poles.

‘I tell you, sir’ (my friend is a staunch Nationalist), ‘they are taking the bread out of our peasants’ mouths.’

A week or two after this conversation I found myself on English soil. Polish pigs had not left my mind, but I had had no time to prosecute inquiries into their further peregrinations. One day I was lunching with an old acquaintance who is a figure in the imported-provision trade. He was lamenting the frozen condition of the Baltic.

‘Just as I was building up a nice little trade in Polish bacon!’ he exclaimed. ‘Now supplies are temporarily stopped and I am driven back to the Dutch, who were holding me up until the Poles began to develop a bacon trade with us.’

I had regained the trail of the plethoric and proliferating Polish pig via the slaughterhouse.

IV

‘The more it changes, the more it is the same thing.’ Polish pigs are now strutting the European stage once occupied by Serbian pigs. By the recent agreement with Rumania they have found an outlet through the Danubian exits for pre-war Serbian pigs — Braila and Galatz. How successful is the trade is shown by the statistics. Every year well over a million are exported on the hoof (or the wing), the figures having gone up threefold since 1924. They are eloquent of the reason for Poland’s insistence on deliveries in kind instead of cash payments in liquidating her Young Plan obligations as a successor state.

But — a million fresh Polish pigs swarming over Europe every year! Europe shudders, and classifies pigs as one of her major troubles, with pig iron. For old mercantilist theories are reviving which look upon imports as things to be retarded, not as exchanges. If imports allow nations to satisfy needs below cost price, they are equally anathema! Even free goods are looked at askance; witness, German reparation deliveries, concerning which the British attitude, as shown at the Hague Conference, is ‘Beware of the Germans bearing gifts!’

What is the solution? Concerning pigs, birth control? Is Nature so exuberant that we must reject her favors? The bounty of pigs is not the only bounty we suffer from. Fish are so prolific that we throw them back into the sea; sugar yields so plentifully that we limit crops; wheat threatens to glut our markets, and we talk of giving it away to the starving Chinese; fruit is left to rot in too generous orchards; production of basic minerals is restricted by quotas. All to keep up prices. Yet we are told that we are eating into our inheritance; truly, to invert the Malthusian formula, our inheritance is eating into us, and the pig pressure on population might well be borne in mind in explaining the pig pressure on haute politique.