A Hope
I
A CERTAIN school of political philosophy has been telling us now these many years that war is, fundamentally, merely a phase, in the human field, of a universal biological process, the struggle for existence. Increase in numbers, through procreation, brings pressure on means of subsistence and physical conflict to survive. Man is the plaything of the same forces that control plants and the lower animals. As human population increases, it sooner or later reaches a point at which food supplies are inadequate for all; struggle begins; war is inevitable, and hence justifiable.
It is, of course, a fact that human population does thus tend to increase, that pressure on means of subsistence does develop. It is even true that with man, because of his very high degree of gregariousness, the pressure may come, in certain localities, more quickly than among many lower forms of life. And if this were all, the struggle for existence and the recurrence of conflict would be forever inevitable.
But is this all? Man alone among the organisms living on the earth has the power of what has been called intellectual adaptation. In the first place, by taking thought he can postpone or ease the pressure of population in many ways. He can emigrate and occupy successfully less favorable environment by putting on clothes or building shelters; he can cultivate the soil and wring more food from it; he can utilize natural forces and make them work for him; he can limit population and retard the growth of numbers to be fed.
In the second place, man, at least in the evolved form in which we know him, is an animal of such complex physical and mental make-up that he does not live by bread alone. There are many other things which he passionately requires, which are essentials of his civilized existence second in importance only to the food sufficient to keep him physically alive; qualities of mind and character, kindliness, honor, tranquillity, home life, science, literature, æsthetic perceptions and their outward manifestations in architecture, painting, sculpture, music — all the long list of things which differentiate civilized man from the savage. The lower animal, forced into conflict by the struggle for existence, evolves organs of offense and defense. Man, through his power of intellectual adaptation, realizing that conflict is destructive of many of the things he prizes dearest, feels his way toward the development of a plan by which the conflict may be averted.
Nevertheless it is true that the prime need of all, the sine qua non of physical existence, is food. And the food which man requires comes from the earth which he inhabits, through the transformation of the dead inorganic materials of which our globe is made into usable organic living things, into vegetable or animal forms which he can eat; and the quantity of life (if I may use that term), whether vegetable, animal, or human, is absolutely dependent on the rapidity with which the transformation takes place.
This process of transformation involves the painfully slow disintegration of the rock surface of the earth by weathering and other processes, the gradual conversion into soil, the combination of the chemical elements of the soil with those of water and air into vegetable tissue — plants drawing their sustenance directly from the soil and atmosphere, while animals and man get theirs directly or indirectly from the plants. The transmutation is so slow that the total volume of organic forms on the earth is almost infinitesimally small compared with the mass of earth materials from which it springs.
The number of human beings who can subsist on the products of the actual soil on which they live is therefore very limited. The limit may, it is true, be raised as new processes which hasten the transformation are discovered and applied; but at any particular time in the world’s history it may be regarded as fixed. It varies with the stage of civilization reached. In a purely hunting and fishing society a very large area is required to support a few people. The domestication of animals and the keeping of herds greatly increase the possible number; the cultivation of crops still further raises it. But even with all the latest discoveries of modern science applied to the production of animal and vegetable foodstuffs, the number of people who can subsist on the products of a given area of land, without recourse to supplies of any kind from outside that area, is small.
Even if man required nothing but food, — no clothing, no houses, no fuel, no luxuries or comforts of any sort, — it is improbable that a given area of average land surface of the earth, good and bad alike, would yield enough to support two hundred persons to the square mile at the present level of food consumption in the Western world. If we add to food requirements other basic demands, — for clothing, shelter, fuel, and so forth, remembering the surface areas which must be set aside for other purposes than the production of food, such as for buildings, roads, wood lots, for the raising of fodder, fibres, and the like, — we get a figure very much lower, probably not over one hundred to the square mile, as the population which can be supported from the products of an average bit of the land surface of the earth. We need not insist too strongly on the exactness of this figure; the real limit may be somewhat higher or somewhat lower. The main point is that there is a limit, that it is approximately of the order of magnitude indicated, and that it is low compared with the present density of population in many of the nations of the Western world.
Whatever the exact limit may be, when it is passed something must be brought in from outside. It may be food; it may be fertilizers; it may be agricultural machinery, or clothing, or raw materials for making clothing, or a thousand and one other things which may seem to have nothing to do with food supplies. The area which the people occupy is no longer self-sufficing. They must procure outside supplies; and they must either purchase them, which means giving up something in exchange in the form of exports, or take them by force, which means plunder or war.
II
There seems to be a naive belief among commercial peoples that exports are beneficial per se. The civilized world has become so accustomed to Trade that it forgets that exports are not an end in themselves, but are merely a means of procuring something regarded as more necessary than the goods given in exchange. The earliest commercial enterprises were plundering expeditions for the direct procurement of things required or coveted. The development of the trade idea has come very gradually through the centuries, with the slow realization that, whatever may be the temporary advantages of merely taking things by force without giving anything in exchange, the benefits of trading instead of plundering are, in the long run, greater. To-day, in the civilized world, direct plundering has ceased to be a recognized means of procuring supplies. Instead, the modern nation which needs imports normally procures them by giving up something in exchange in the form of exports.
Several stages of economic growth may be distinguished. Exports for the purpose of procuring food are likely, first, to take the form of the more easily procurable raw materials, such as minerals or forestry products. As population pressure increases, there may be added various non-edible rawmaterial products of agriculture, such as the fibres. A later stage sees these domestic raw materials turned into higher-valued manufactured goods for export. The final stage in the most highly developed industrial and commercial states of to-day adds the exports of manufactures made both from domestic and from imported raw materials. One stage follows another, not because people wish to devote time and labor to the production of goods to send out of the country, but because with the increase of population it is only by this process that they are able to procure the things which are essential to their continued existence and comfort.
In the actual world there are, of course, no clear-cut lines of demarcation between these various stages. Many a state whose population is still sufficiently sparse to leave it potentially able to produce its own food procures some of its supplies elsewhere, in actual practice, because through some combination of circumstances, such as the possession of unusually cheap and abundant supplies of raw materials for exchange, it can get them cheaper thus. Many a state procures from abroad a far larger proportion of its food than would be necessary if it developed its own supplies to their fullest extent, because for one reason or another it is advantageous to do so. Similarly, in practice, many a nation finds it profitable to export one kind of foodstuff and import another, or one kind of raw material in exchange for another, or manufactures against manufactures; so that the modern world presents an interchange of commodities so vast and complex as to conceal the basic truth that the driving force which lies at the back of these exchanges is the pressure of population, which makes the procuring of things abroad essential. Trade does not arise because peoples desire to part with things (export), but grows out of the necessity of procuring other things (import).
Beginning, perhaps, with a mere desire to get articles from abroad which are not produced at home; developing, as population becomes more dense, into a necessity to get such things in order to live, there has grown up the vastly complex thing which we call international trade. It has expanded to such an extent that at present no nation, even though its population be relatively sparse, is wholly self-sufficing.
Any event which clogs the wheels of this complex exchange causes privation somewhere; but the real significance is often concealed because it rarely happens that food supplies are directly affected. Usually it is only in actual warfare that the checking of the flow of foodstuffs becomes obvious. Most interferences are with other sorts of goods, — raw materials or manufactures, — and public opinion, which in general condemns any tampering with food supplies, is apt to regard them merely as interferences with trade without at all realizing their ultimate meaning, which is a checking somewhere of the movement of food.
The seriousness of the results vary, of course, with the actual conditions. Slight checks may have important consequences in the most highly dependent nations, while even great interference, in highly self-sufficing countries, may result merely in inconvenience. The effects may, according to varying circumstances, run all the way from slight privation caused by inability to procure, or increase in price of, relatively unimportant commodities, up to serious shortage of essential foodstuffs. Any interference, at least among nations accustomed to Western standards of living, is a cause of friction; and if the nation affected happens to be densely populated (say over one hundred to the square mile) the interference will not only threaten its supplies of comforts, luxuries, and many important adjuncts of civilized life, but will check the inflow of its required food. In general, the denser the population the more serious the threat.
Of the Western nations, Spain has a population of 108 to the square mile; Portugal, 159; Poland, 203; Denmark, 201; Austria, 201; France, 191; Switzerland, 250; Hungary, 233; Czechoslovakia, 267; Germany, 345; Italy, 341; the United Kingdom, 469; Holland, 562; Belgium, 675; England, alone, 701. For comparative purposes, it should be remembered that the United States has 40.
Under such circumstances interference with trade is interference with food supplies, and the possibility of conflict is ever present — the gun is loaded. Any one of an almost infinite variety of triggers may cause an explosion. It may be a Jenkins’s ear; the assassination of a prince; an ‘insult’ to a flag; a quarrel over an oil concession. Once the trigger is pulled, a thousand and one other motives are inflamed: racial hatreds, religious animosities; appeals to ‘honor’ or ‘justice,’ propaganda piled on propaganda, tales of outrage too frequently true but often false — anything to kindle and keep alive the fighting spirit of the masses. But behind it all, the ultimate cause of all — loading the gun — is the economic fact that the peoples engaged have need of something which their own territory does not produce, and that the procuring of it has in some way encountered obstacles.
III
It is true, then, that in the actual world as we know it to-day the fundamental cause of war is economic, acting through pressure on means of subsistence. But does it, then, follow that war is inevitable?
The gun is loaded; and most of the world’s efforts toward peace appear to have been thus far abortive. The trouble is that these efforts have been, in the main, devoted to the search for triggers, and their destruction, one by one, as found; or the setting up of organization for persuading a nation which is about to strike to withhold the blow. All such efforts to adjust quarrels are thoroughly praiseworthy — arbitration, conference, economic or financial pressure or threats of punishment, world courts, leagues of nations, or anything else which tends to prevent or stop a fight. But they do not reach the root of the matter. Until we can devise some means for unloading the gun, wars must be expected to recur.
A huge task? Yes; but not an insuperable one. World population as a whole has increased only about 50 per cent in a century, — not an overwhelming rate, — and the general average density to-day, about thirty-five to the square mile of land surface, is still far from the danger point. The advance in agricultural science through the introduction of irrigation, subsoil drainage, deep ploughing, dry farming, the use of artificial fertilizers, improved rotation of crops, nitrogen fixation, and numerous other improvements, has probably kept food production, on the whole, well ahead of population increase. The real trouble lies, not in insufficient aggregate supplies, but in the concentration of population in certain relatively small areas of the earth’s surface to such an extent that nearly every modern nation must get food and raw materials from outside its own frontiers. There is still enough to go round, but there are checks to its distribution.
Time was when nations possessing relative abundance of such goods sought to favor their own nationals by hindering export through prohibitions or export duties; when other nations with inadequate supplies tried to put their citizens in a favored position for competitive buying by offering bounties on imports. Such forms of direct assistance have, however, all but disappeared. Relatively few remnants remain of either export duties or import bounties; and, speaking broadly, the main form of assistance which still persists, and is the chief means by which any nation seeks to give its people an economic advantage over foreigners, is in import duties, not on foodstuffs or raw materials, but on manufactured goods. The effect on the movement of raw materials is, nevertheless, obvious. A manufacturer ‘protected’ by a tariff wall is artificially placed in a stronger competitive position in the purchase of imported raw materials than his fellow in a foreign country not protected or not so fully protected. There is an artificial diversion of the flow.
Most people do not object seriously to fair competition. Man to man, they face it cheerfully. But when one man or set of men gets artificial aid, when there is discrimination in opportunity, when barriers are set up to the procurement of vitally necessary supplies, then hatred, suspicion, and resentment are the fruit. If we could have free movement of goods from nation to nation, unhampered by legislative embarrassments, such freedom as exists to-day among the forty-eight separate commonwealths of the American Union, the dangers of armed conflict would be reduced to a minimum.
Of course you will say, and you will be right, that this suggestion of universal free trade is, under present conditions, an idle dream. The Great War, far from hastening any movement toward this end, has, if anything, intensified nationalistic feeling and strengthened the determination of most nations to ‘protect’ their own industries. In spite of this, however, certain developments which began decades ago and were given enormous stimulus during the late war point in another direction, and it is to these that I wish particularly to call attention.
IV
For a long time past it has been obvious to serious students of economic practice that there has been developing, in the realm of large business affairs, a certain spirit of accommodation which was tending slowly to eliminate some of the savagery and absurdity of cutthroat competition. Laissezfaire, in literal application, has been found too wasteful, and by various devices — agreements, consolidations, cartels, territorial allocation of markets, and many others — there has been manifested a slowly developing realization that better results may often be attained by recognizing the interests of one’s competitors. This was noticeable in many countries in the domestic field; it was even more marked in the arena of international business. Side by side with politicians who talked, ever more and more, of the rights and interests of their own nationals and the increasing necessity to ‘protect’ them, there was developing a class of internationally-minded manufacturers, merchants, financiers, and the like — men who had come to realize that the best self-interest is one that permits of a give-and-take coöperation with competitors, that thinks of the other fellow as well as of itself, that recognizes the basic economic fact that there can be no such thing as a long-continued ‘corner’ in prosperity.
All this, let me repeat, was distinctly noticeable long before 1914. But the war gave a mighty emphasis to it.
Early in the conflict it became apparent that victory would be very largely a question of supplies. The armies and the munitions factories could not function without an abundant and steady inflow of materials. Interruptions might be fatal; and each government — in fact each department of each government — must look to it that these supplies were forthcoming. If there were even remote dangers of interruption from any source whatever, stocks had to be built up sufficiently to tide over any possible period of restriction. In the early period, without control of production and distribution, the absurd situation arose that allied governments — in some cases even departments of the same government — were found to be competing for the same materials, raising prices and causing untold confusion and waste. To obviate this difficulty it became necessary, as the war progressed, first to concentrate control and coördinate the purchasing within each country, and second, later, to set up machinery for interallied control and distribution.
When the United States entered the conflict a similar set of experiences led to the setting up of control here too, through the War Trade Board, the War Industries Board, the Food Administration, and other bodies. The first of these controlled exports and imports of materials directly or indirectly necessary to the prosecution of the war; the second had wide powers in overseeing all industries in the country whose maintenance was essential to the war, preventing waste and duplication, watching supplies of raw materials, and so forth; while the third, in similar fashion, looked after food supplies. Close coöperation with the Allies also soon became essential, and the United States, through all of these organizations, joined with the other nations in carrying on an international control.
By these means the chaos which threatened disaster in the early days of the war was, in large measure, conquered; and a fairly steady and reliable flow of supplies to those points where they were most needed was secured. No one seriously questions that control of this sort was demanded by the emergency and that it worked advantageously.
But these were war measures. They were possible, on the scale on which they operated, only because the great emergency overshadowed and overcame the misgivings and opposition of personal and private interests which in many cases were adversely affected. It is highly improbable that in time of peace, with the emergency removed, any such widespread system of control would be either possible or desirable. For it was not in the setting up of governmental regulation of production and distribution, which might be carried over directly from war conditions to peace conditions, that the war gave the great impetus to the ’live and let live’ attitude of mind to which I have referred. It was, rather, in the new vision given to scores of thousands of men of affairs, of the convenience and profitableness in abating the intensity of cutthroat competition.
No man who took any active part in the operations of the control boards which I have mentioned could fail to be deeply impressed by an outstanding phenomenon of the experience. The operations of control involved the calling of hundreds, or even thousands, of conferences of business rivals, in groups of from two or three up to several score. In instance after instance, these men who had carried on a savage trade rivalry in times of peace were forced by the exigencies of war to confer with each other and to adopt a less uncompromising attitude toward each other’s business. And they found, to their surprise, that all ivere materially benefited. Many a man who had been an ardent individualist, who believed, and believed rightly, that competition is the life of trade, that individual initiative depends on individual responsibility, discovered, to his astonishment, that the making of certain adjustments with his rivals not only did not interfere with his individual freedom or initiative in any serious way, or destroy the vitalizing principle of true competition, but also brought certain very definite benefits both to him and to his rivals.
Nowhere was this truer than in the realm of raw-material supplies. Elimination of the speculator-middleman (who frequently causes the greatest of all disturbance in the flow of raw materials) was in itself enough to make the coöperation profitable. Steadier supplies were assured, the amount of capital tied up in reserve stocks was reduced, and greater stability was secured.
V
There was nothing new in all this, let me repeat. All that the war experience did was to bring home to a vastly increased number of individuals the great truth that a spirit of accommodation, a willingness to coöperate, a recognition of the interests even of rival businesses, may be desirable, not for any moral or sentimental reasons, but because it pays. There is always, of course, danger of reaction. Narrowly selfish individual interests, shortviewed interests, speculative interests, frequently run counter to this broader view. But thousands of business men, especially the men of larger affairs, had a new vision of the results of a more yielding attitude toward one’s competitors, which makes the danger of reaction far less imminent and insistent than ever before in the modern business world.
All this was in the domestic field. International regulation taught the same lesson when we had the interallied control of raw materials — one of the most important experiments in the history of the world. Its success should never be forgotten.
The machinery for this control was simple; there was set up in Paris what was known as the Interallied Munitions Council, to which were submitted, by the war councils of the allied and associated nations, their estimates of the quantities of various raw materials required for specified periods. Under the Munitions Council were half a dozen committees, composed of representatives of the various countries, dealing with specific groups of commodities. Some of these sat in London, some in Paris, some alternated between the two places.
An idea of the details can best be given by describing the methods of only one of these committees — the Non-Ferrous Metals Committee. It consisted of three English representatives, two French, three Italian, and one American, each country having one vote regardless of the number of representatives. It had under its charge a long list of the more essential nonferrous metals — antimony, lead, copper, zinc, tungsten, nickel, platinum, molybdenum, and one or two nonmetallic materials as well, such as rubber and mica. (Tin, which presented one of the most difficult problems of all, was dealt with separately as described below.) The Committee was divided into seven subcommittees, each dealing with associated groups of materials, each subcommittee being made up of one representative from each country.
The operation was as follows. The war councils of the various countries submitted their statements of requirements to the Interallied Munitions Council in Paris; the Council referred the statements to the appropriate committee, and the committee to one of its subcommittees. The subcommittee scrutinized the demands; kept itself informed as to the quantity and whereabouts of available supplies; compared the relative urgency of demand from the various countries; called on the representative of any country whose demands appeared excessive to present proofs of its needs; and finally reported back to the general committee a plan of allocation of available supplies, with information, when necessary, as to where supplies could be obtained. The general committee then reviewed the report of the subcommittee (usually only a matter of form) and forwarded a definite recommendation to the Council in Paris. The Council then, after conference with the Interallied Financial Council and the Interallied Maritime Council on questions of finance and shipping, when these were involved, took final action.
Such, in outline, was the procedure in regard to materials the supplies of which were sufficiently abundant to make it reasonably certain that all the countries could obtain enough to meet their most essential demands. The advantages obtained were the elimination of competitive buying, the checking of less essential uses, and the removal of the necessity for building up the large reserve stocks which safety would have required if each country, through the Council, had not been assured a steady flow of supplies.
But there were certain other commodities the production of which was so limited that there was not enough to go round, where most rigid economy in use had to be exercised, where really essential uses had to be sacrificed in favor of even more essential ones, and where prices, without regulation, had soared to impossible heights. Such, for example, were especially tin, nitrates, wool, leather, and, later, platinum and tungsten.
Again I can best give an idea of the method adopted for dealing with such commodities by describing one case, that of tin. World production was limited; uncontrolled use was calling for a total considerably larger than the aggregate annual output. The situation required special treatment. After months of negotiation, the four Powers chiefly interested signed a special international agreement setting up the Interallied Tin Executive. This consisted of two Englishmen, two Americans, one Frenchman, and one Italian.
The powers of the Executive were very broad. The four countries represented on it are the only considerable consumers of tin in the world. The Executive became their sole purchaser. It set up single purchasing agencies in each of the tin-producing countries; it allocated the tin to the Allies in proportion to their needs; it cut out the middleman who had been making enormous profit out of the unprotected consumer; it fixed prices at which tin was purchased and sold. In short, it was a practically complete world control in tin and tin ore, and governed nearly the whole of the annual world production of the metal.
More or less similar arrangements were set up for nitrate, wool, and leather; and at the time of the Armistice negotiations were in progress for the same sort of control of tungsten and platinum.
Many more details might be given, but enough has been said to emphasize the fact that under pressure of war conditions a very widespread system of international control of raw materials was established.
And it worked! The instructions to the American members of the mission which took part in the work were to ‘play the game with all the cards on the table,’ to make no attempt to gain undue advantage. This was also, in general, the attitude of the representatives of the other countries concerned. There was, in the main, a spirit of the heartiest and most hopeful and helpful coöperation. There were naturally many long discussions as to relative needs, but decisions once reached were very genuinely concurred in. The system, on the whole, worked so satisfactorily that many of those who took part in the operations were led to dream that a similar plan of international control and allocation might be continued, with similar happy results, as a permanent institution after the conclusion of the war.
The dream was short-lived. There is much evidence that England, France, and Italy were anxious to continue the control at least through the period of reconstruction, though it is highly improbable that they would have been willing to include Germany in the arrangement. But the American Government stood aloof. On the signing of the Armistice, the American representatives were withdrawn from the various committees, the Executives wound up their affairs within a few weeks, and the negotiations concerning tungsten and platinum ended abruptly. The moment it became apparent that the United States intended to play a lone hand, there was a scramble among the others to get out too. The momentum of war coöperation, which might conceivably have been able to carry some form of organization along even in face of certain narrow personal and political interests which were opposed, was lost, and coöperative international control of raw materials came to an abrupt end.
But its value as an object lesson remains. In spite of the short-lived operation of the system, the experience of its working emphasized two things in particular which give hope for the future — the profitableness, from the point of view of enlightened self-interest, of a give-and-take coöperation even with foreigners, and the value of the fullest and most open publicity possible, of reliable information as to raw-material supplies. We have lost the continuity of public international control, but there remains a deepened sense of the economic wisdom of a self-interest that thinks of the other fellow too.
VI
The recrudescence of nationalism which seems just now to be so noticeable a product of the war is chiefly political in origin. It is of a sort which does not, on the whole, have the backing of the big business world. If politicians could be persuaded to keep their hands off, there is no question that the business interests of Europe and America would more and more ‘play the game’ together. That the world has long ago learned that trade, in the long run, is preferable to plunder, because it is more expedient, because it pays; that the men of large affairs in all Western nations have had a new proof that a give-and-take international policy is better than cutthroat competition, because it pays — these are the best augury for our hope that international-mindedness is becoming an increasingly potent factor in world affairs in spite of all present appearances to the contrary.
This is not at all to suggest that we are moving in the direction of national or international governmental control of production or distribution. Under the exigencies of war such a system was necessary. It worked, and worked well. In time of peace any such thoroughgoing imposition of state control would be impossible and would be undesirable even if possible. The hope for the future lies not in the fact that compulsory control and regulation in an emergency gave efficiency to a fighting machine, but in the fact that they revealed, or emphasized, to so many thousands of individuals the truth that voluntary coöperation and control in the matter of supplies are worth while because they will help in the business of earning a living.
Except under a dictatorship there can be no universally applicable formula for beneficial coöperation such as we have been discussing. To endure, it must be voluntary. It must rest squarely on the only sound economic principle, that it is desirable because it pays; and its promise for the future lies in the fact that increasing numbers of the active agents in the economic life of the world are learning that it does pay. The agents of the evolution are the myriads of individuals and groups of individuals who are carrying on the international business activities of the world. They may be, and usually are, unconscious agents. They may be wholly void of any intention so to conduct their affairs as to promote the welfare of society. Their immediate aim may be altogether selfish, but if their selfishness is tempered by the knowledge that it is to their advantage to take the interests of others into account, then they push forward the evolution toward saner and more peaceful methods.
Thus the most powerful forces which actuate mankind, the economic, are developing in the world a spirit of accommodation, a considerateness, which promises permanency because it is based solidly on intelligent self-interest.
This sounds like a doctrine of complacency. ‘Let things alone, and the forces that are at work will in the course of time bring us to the millennium,’ seems to be the corollary. But it is not. The mere student of human progress may be satisfied when he has understood and analyzed the forces that are at work — the factors of the problem, the trend of things. But he who feels the impulse to be a leader, to assist directly in the evolution, will, after analyzing the forces, seek to foster them and to remove obstacles from their path of operation. And if he be a wise leader he will steel himself to an infinite patience, being content with small advances, not attempting to force the pace of a progress which must of necessity be slow.
This brings us squarely to the question as to what specific things might to-day, under existing circumstances, be done to facilitate the operation of the forces of coöperative self-interest such as have been described. What steps might a farsighted statesman, say in America, reasonably be expected to take?
There are two, I believe, that are obvious: the removal, so far as possible, of political obstacles to the internationalization of business, and the provision of means for procuring and disseminating full reliable information as to the production, distribution, consumption, and stocks of all the chief basic raw materials, including foodstuffs.
The first of these presents many difficulties. Any move in the direction suggested encounters the double obsession of the professional politician that Big Business is an evil thing and that any kind of dealing with foreigners except selling them goods is certain to undermine our liberties. Yet there are encouraging signs, even here. The bugaboo of Big Business is by no means so dreaded a spectre as a generation ago. The Sherman Act and similar legislation are far from being so drastic in their application as they once were. Our authorities, as well as our people, have learned that it is possible to regulate without destroying; that giant business combines have their uses and that abuses may be cured without the use of lethal gases. There is now some movement, even, in the direction of fostering combination, under appropriate supervision, in the interest of greater efficiency and better service to the consuming public.
There is nothing in the nature of the case which would prevent the doing in the international field of this same thing that has been done, and is being done, in the domestic field. International business combines, under proper supervision in order to minimize the danger of abuses of power, — which supervision would, of course, have to be provided for by international political agreement, — are as logical a development as the large domestic combines, and would unquestionably confer the same sort of economic benefits while at the same time promoting the cause of better mutual international understanding. The policy of the statesman would be to frown on all legislation which tends to check this sort of development, and to promote, through diplomatic negotiations, the adoption of international agreements through which the danger of abuses may be removed.
The second step, the gathering and dissemination of reliable statistical information, would not be especially difficult. The business world already clearly recognizes the desirability of such information, and already many private and quasi-public agencies are seeking to meet the demand; but they are as yet almost wholly inadequate to the proper performance of the task. Private organizations and publications deal with specific commodities or groups of commodities, but their data even when accurate and up-to-date are usually accessible only to the relatively few who, directly or indirectly, pay the cost of the compilations. Various quasi-public agencies, chambers of commerce, boards of trade, exchanges, and the like, likewise publish commodity data, but they are frequently limited in scope, or colored by local interests, or out of date. Nearly every national and state government in the world also gives out vast masses of statistical material; but it is, on the whole, either notoriously inaccurate or hopelessly stale before it reaches the light of day, and even when these fatal imperfections are absent there is so little coördination between the methods employed by different states or nations that the value of the service in lending assistance in the making of current day-by-day business decisions is almost nil.
Yet, it would be fairly easy, under competent leadership, to develop a system of up-to-the-minute commodity information. Under the stimulus of war necessity, the machinery for such a purpose, in connection with a large number of commodities, was brought to a high degree of perfection. Such an organization as the Interallied Munitions Council, for example, through its committees, had monthly, weekly, and in some cases complete daily information as to the exact situation on all the long list of commodities with which it was dealing. Other organizations had similar information on many other classes of goods. The value of the data was seen to be so great, not merely for military purposes, but as an adjunct to normal peace-time activities as well, that before the Armistice was signed a movement was started for utilizing this war machinery in the establishment of an International Statistical Bureau. It did not get very far at the time, partly, at least, because of the withdrawal of the United States, but it might be revived. Indeed, it has been partially revived in one of the activities of the League of Nations. Hearty support of some such movement as this should obviously be an item in the programme of any farseeing statesman really desirous of promoting the cause of better international understanding. Whether the work be done by the League of Nations, or by the International Chamber of Commerce, or by some new agency yet to be established, is probably a matter of relative unimportance; but one thing, at least, is fundamental — the hearty coöperation of the various governments concerned. Machinery for the gathering of accurate, up-to-date information, when that information can only be obtained from millions of separate private individuals, must be at least quasi-public in character; and until governments coöperate, or at least acquiesce, in the activity, the results must fall far short of being anything like truly adequate. Thus here again the services of the statesman are called for, in the promotion, through diplomatic negotiations, of international agreement to coöperate in this vastly important field.
Now I do not at all mean to suggest that these two bits of machinery alone — provision for a freer development of internationalized business, and the publication of up-to-date statistical data — will usher in the millennium. Human progress is essentially slow and wise leadership does not attempt the obviously impossible. It is content with small gains when great ones are clearly unattainable. But in this movement toward an international-mindedness in business affairs, based on intelligent economic self-interest, there is real promise for a future in which shortage of supplies, due not to inadequacy of aggregate world production, but to artificial political checks to distribution, shall have been removed, and this most fundamental cause of international conflict shall no longer threaten us — when this gun, at least, shall have been unloaded. The two specific steps which I have mentioned will be a movement in this direction.