The Age of Alchemy

by GARET GARRETT

1

STATED simply, the one most important institution in our complex scheme of material civilization — universal in it—is breaking up before our eyes. World War I rocked it to its foundations; World War II may well finish it. The name of that institution is international trade.

People will always be tree, we suppose, to exchange with one another unlike and unique goods, and may find endless satisfaction in doing it. What we speak of here is international trade regarded as a necessity.

In its origin there was no element of necessity, or hardly any, except in special regional cases. The spirit was adventure, the motive was profit, the method was one of ruthless exploitation of the innocents. The fact of necessity evolved, and as it evolved the profit declined, until profit alone — private profit — was not enough to sustain it; whereupon governments began to take foreign trade out of the hands of private traders to control it for political ends and to subsidize it with public funds, because at last the necessity had become vital, and was of this kind: —

First, that a people who had abandoned agriculture for industry were obliged to import food and raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods, in order to live.

Second, that as the machines of the industrial nations multiplied, the output of manufactured goods came to be more than could be absorbed by the people who produced only food and raw materials and had generally a low standard of living. Then came the specter of surplus and unemployment in the industrial nations and the struggle among them to sell their similar and competitive machine wares in one another’s markets. At the same time, each put up tariff barriers against the others; that is to say, each was trying to invade the markets of the others while desperately defending its own.

At the beginning of the modern machine age, Adam Smith, writing on the uses of foreign trade, said: “The land and labor of Great Britain produce generally more corn, woolens, and hardware than the demand of the home market requires. The surplus part of them, therefore, must be sent abroad and exchanged for something for which there is a demand at home. It is only by means of such exportation that this surplus can acquire a value sufficient to compensate the labor and expense of producing it.”

This was about 1776. If we have the faintest idea of what the standard of common living was at that time in England, we know that there was no surplus of human satisfactions. The same labor, land, and capital that produced what Smith calls a surplus might have been employed to produce more of the goods people wanted at home instead of goods they had to send away. At least, that was true then. We know also that the goods they sent away did not all come back in the form of things the people wanted; a great part of what was exported took the form of investments in foreign countries — tramways, railroads, docks, London façades in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The kind of trade Adam Smith was talking about was trade for profit, and the profit was so great that England sacrificed her own agriculture to industry. In a little while there was no more surplus corn to sell (corn in the Old World meaning small grains, not maize). instead, she found herself importing not only the materials of food for human consumption but the raw materials her machines devoured. In a little while more her “umbilical cords” ran to every part of the world; and since these cords were vital to her preferred way of existence she had to protect them. In order to protect them she had to control the seas.

The system worked very well and was wonderfully profitable so long as she had what amounted to a world monopoly of machine craft. The first nation to threaten that monopoly was Germany. The second was the United States. At the outbreak of World War I, these were the three principal industrial nations of the world; Japan was coming.

2

One effect of the war was that the machine went migrating. Every intelligent nation wanted machines of its own, because, in the first place, it was seen that a nation with no industrial power of its own was helpless in time of war, even as a neutral; and, secondly, there was no longer any doubt that a people who produced only food and raw materials for export, and exchanged them for manufactured goods, tended to become fixed in the inferior economic status, with a low standard of living. Thus, new machine industry became apparitional all over the world; and no sooner had a country found its own way with machines than it began to want markets for a surplus of competitive machine products and a favorable balance of trade.

At a luncheon in London, Lord Astor turned to me, saying: “Do you know, as a result of the war many countries now have industries that are not entitled to have them.” My answer was to ask: “How does an Englishman determine what countries are entitled to have industry?”

Besides the countries that now had industries of their own for the first time, the three principal industrial countries had enormously increased their capacity during the war, especially Germany and the United States; and meanwhile, Japan had arrived.

Such were the conditions under which Great Britain argued that even if she could afford to pay her war debt to the United States Treasury, we could not afford to receive payment. Why was that? Because she would have to pay us in competitive industrial products — in textiles, machinery, and hardware; and if we took such goods from her, what should we do with the American labor that was employed in producing like goods — not only enough for the American market, but a surplus for sale in foreign markets? If she should sell her goods elsewhere in the world to get the money to pay her debt to the United States Treasury, it would come to the same thing, for she would be taking away our customers.

What we did was to raise our tariffs against all foreign manufactures, those of England included, to keep them from displacing American goods in the American market; and then we loaned Europe eight or ten billions with which to buy the surplus product of American industry. All of those billions we lost. Worse still, a very large part of what we loaned to Europe and lost there in the 1920’s was used to increase the industrial capacity of Europe, both in countries that had industry before, like Germany, and in others like Poland and Czechoslovakia. We were buying competition for ourselves.

And yet, because the political and financial ruin of international trade was an event the world was not prepared to face, all this immense absurdity was passed over.

The idea of economic self-containment now runs in bad company. It is associated with political isolationism. But we are not discussing self-containment as an idea or an ideal. We are trying to look at what has happened to international trade, and at the impending ruin of it; and if this does at length force the world into several great regions of self-containment, the people inhabiting those regions need be no more isolated from one another than farmers who lived side by side on the kind of farm plot that once was natural and ideal, beginning at the stream and running to the top of the next hill. Each farmer had, therefore, water, pasture, lowland, upland, and on the hillside his woodlot. But he was not, by reason of this perfect selfcontainment, isolated from his neighbors.

With the profit gone out of it, and with the supply of docile people willing to perform the drudgeries of its primary production coming to an end, one would say that international trade had outlived itself; but one would say also that if the necessity for it were vital a way would be found to go on with it. Let it be a question of survival for the industrial people, of living or not living, and such a thing as profit really does not count.

But if the vital necessity is in a state of decline, tending to disappear, then the ruin of international trade as we have known it, and as we continue to think of it, is very clearly indicated. The startling premonition that this may be so has its strange occasions.

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Not long before Pearl Harbor, reflecting on what might be the next state of the world and what we should do with a conquered Japan, I was turning the pages of the Japan Times Weekly, especially the advertising pages, for it was a number devoted to foreign trade, and there were the things Japan was going to make and sell all over the world at competitive prices, save in Asia; she would enclose Asia from competition in order to sell them there on her own terms. What things? Well, all the things she once bought from the machine people of the West before she learned how to make them, first for herself and then for export. And these are the things, moreover, that the Western machine people still want to sell in the East: for example, machinery, tools, hardware, electrical equipment, glass, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, motorcars, garage equipment, guns and munitions, typewriters, plastics, rayon, cotton goods, agricultural implements, surgical instruments, optical goods, engines of all kinds, tires and rubber goods, wire cable, leather belting, and so on and on. And for nearly all these things Japan has to think first of importing the raw materials.

In the same number of the magazine there was a continuing discussion of the Greater Asia Co-prosperity Plan. Under this plan the inferior people will be the hewers and drawers — and the “inferior” people are all others than the Japanese. Thus, from China, there will come to Japan coal and ore; and perhaps the culture of the silkworm, as seeming now to be below the dignity of an overlord people, will be transferred from Japan to China. From what was French IndoChina, rice, corn, and rubber will come to Japan. From Thailand, rice, rubber, lumber, and lac. From what were the Dutch East Indies, rubber, sugar, tea, tobacco, copra, and oil. From the Philippines, sugar, hemp, tobacco, and more lumber. Food for the Japanese and raw materials for their machines. Five or six hundred millions of Chinese, Javanese, Malays, and Balinese performing the tasks of primary production for ninety millions of Japanese; and for the Japanese, industry, banking, shipping, administration, profit, power, empire.

There is nothing new in this plan, save only that it is Japanese — that is, it is Japan doing to Asia what the West did to the East. Nor is there anything new in the naïve Japanese words: “In this way the relationship will become one of give-and-take, and will benefit both parties.”

But there was a Japanese editor, too, thinking his own thoughts, as an editor sometimes will; and suddenly all this grand thesis collided with something the Japanese propaganda bureau had not put in his mind — namely, the premonition we spoke of. He did not intend this to happen. It was as an accident. He was writing an editorial about what would happen to Japan if the United States stopped buying her silk, and he said, defiantly: “As the United States believes it is ready to do without much or most of its silk, by the substitution of nylon, this country also has to learn to do without some of the things which silk dollars could buy. Synthetic methods are not confined to one country.”

And from there he went headlong to the accident. “The growing power of chemistry,” he said, “is doing much to provide the have-not countries with the products they need, even as Germany has been able to make a synthetic rubber of great practical value, whose quality is improving monthly. No research or manufacturing chemist today would hesitate to predict that most countries, in a not too distant time, will be able to find all the essential things in their own back yards. There will be merely the necessity to pass soil and rocks through machines or processes for the recovery of wanted materials. The outlook offers a distant solution to the problem of international trade. It should not be necessary for a country, in order to live, to send its manufactures to distant lands or to import the necessities.”

Now what had he said? If it were true, then neither the China affair, as they speak of it, nor the contemplated total conquest of Asia and the South Pacific which was about to begin, could be regarded as a rational adventure. There was pride of idea in what he had written; he believed it. Yet what would the censor say?

Therefore he added this: Japan in due time will have to find her opportunities within her own economy, but the situation today demands interim measures such as the government is working out.”

Here is, perhaps, the strangest thing that was ever defined: an interim war; a war belonging not to the future but to the past; a war not to perpetuate international trade but only to keep it alive for a while.

This consternation of doubt, taking place in the mind of a Japanese editor, is merely a vivid and unexpected exhibit. The economic thought of the world is in the same way stultified. When the war is over, shall we have to scrap our synthetic rubber industry, keeping only a few plants to remember it by in case we need it again? And if so, why? In order that we may go on buying natural rubber in Asia, for unless we do go on buying rubber in Asia, instead of making it for ourselves, it will be very bad for international trade and ruinous for the people of Asia who have learned to live by rubber — to say nothing of our friends, the Dutch and English, who own the rubber plantations.

We can now begin to make out dimly the economic evolution that is taking place. We are passing from the age of machine techniques to the age of alchemy. It is a momentous event. Future and past are in conflict. One remembers the saying of Walter Bagehot, on history, that many times it had seemed that people were about to make a great step forward, they had prepared for it, they knew what they were doing and where they were going; then they had looked back, and did not advance.

If one takes the Anglo-American projection to be authentically represented by the Atlantic Charter, the system of lend-lease agreements touching the world that shall come after, the Hull Doctrine, the apocalyptic economics of Henry Wallace, the guilt theme of Sumner Welles, the Report of the London Chamber of Commerce on the General Principles of a Post-War Economy, and what may be called the British Confession by Sir Stafford Cripps, one will see that it begins with contrition and proceeds from a certain assumption as to what was wrong with the world before. Those who mainly controlled the raw-material resources of the earth were too selfish, too much concerned with their own profit, too unmindful of the needs of others. That was wrong. That was why international trade became a moral and economic nightmare. Hereafter it must be different. Nations must learn to think not only of themselves but of one another, too; and all people must have access to raw materials and markets according to their needs.

All of this, says the other side, is Devil’s holy water. The aggressor mentally assumes that those who control the sources of raw material will be selfish and heedless. What is possession for? Sources of wealth are not to be shared. They are to be exploited by those who are strong enough to take them.

But what is left out — missing both from the Anglo-American projection and from the brutal aggressor thesis — is the fact of economic evolution.

4

As we pass from the age of techniques to the age of alchemy — if we do — we shall cease to think of raw materials as deposits of solar energy that must be dug out of the earth’s crust, or as a kind of plant life that will flourish only in a certain place. The sources will be such as no one can conquer, possess exclusively, or exploit selfishly.

In forgotten textbooks, one finds that less than a hundred and fifty years ago the political and economic thought of the world was sunk in gloomy meditation on the food supply. A man named Malthus had written a treatise in which he demonstrated what was then a fact — namely, that population in a natural way tended to increase much faster than the food supply. The number of arable acres was a limited quantity, not by any means increasable, whereas the impulse of the human species to reproduce itself knew no limit. If this were true, then the human race was doomed to be limited by a tragic fringe of misery and starvation, unless it could think of a way to limit itself by continence. The reason no one could reason away this doctrine of Malthus was that no one could imagine what was going to happen.

It was not that vast areas of virgin land were opening, as in North America; there would soon be an end to that and the situation would be again as it was, according to the Malthus formula. Primitive agriculture was passing; scientific agriculture was coming. Knowledge was increasing. The application of scientific thought to agriculture, plus modern transportation, so increased the power of man to bring forth food from the earth and to make it available that in the hundred years after Malthus population increased as it had never increased in any century before; and the more it increased, the more food there was, to the absurd point of surplus.

From this unpredictable solution of the food problem there was a tremendous release of human energy. The measure of it may be imagined from the fact that in two generations the amount of human energy necessary to be spent in agriculture fell at least one half. That is what made the industrial age possible. Otherwise it could not have arrived. The labor for it could not have been spared from agriculture.

But with the rise of modern industry appeared a new kind of food problem. There was a new stomach to fill. Machines had to be fed. They devoured raw materials insatiably. And as it had been once supposed that the human food supply was limited by what the art of primitive agriculture could produce from an inexpansible number of acres, so, when we began to worry about enough raw materials to feed the machines, it was supposed that the supply of these was limited, too. A coal mine here, an oil well there, a kind of tree that would flourish only in a certain climate — and whoever owned the coal mine and the oil well and the area where the tree grew could feed their own machines and starve the machines of rival people. So there came to be a Malthusian doctrine of raw materials, and it was implicit in the power politics of the world.

Like the original Malthusian doctrine, this one was true in the making — true, that is to say, in relation to the then state of knowledge. Today it is true mainly for the reason that we continue to think and behave as if it were, war being one form of that as if behavior. In a little while, if we advance, not only will it not be true: it will be remembered as a superstition. Already we know better. The disparity between what we know and what we do is the supreme tragedy.

Liberating knowledge — it is scientific knowledge we speak of — does not come as revelation. It grows by accretion. Its beginnings very often seem frivolous.

What happened to the ivory trade? Man wanted more and more ivory, especially for billiard balls, and the supply was failing. It would not pay to cultivate elephants for the tusks; besides, it was perhaps impossible ever to get enough that way. Where did ivory come from? Not from the elephant, really, but from what the elephant ate. What the elephant ate was grass. Therefore, ivory was from grass. The elephant was merely a natural chemical works, converting something that was in grass into a thing called ivory. Even then one might have been sure that when the demand for more ivory, or for something that would do in place of it, became very urgent, so that the incentive was high, a brooding chemist would begin to think like that and end by finding what that something was, in the grass the elephant ate, that made ivory. At any rate, that happened. He found it. And then it was possible to do purposefully in an artificial laboratory what the elephant does naturally without knowing how. After that there were plenty of cheap billiard balls.

Such, very roughly, was the beginning of plastics, and yet it is only now, under stress of necessity, that we perceive the possibilities of plastics in structural uses, in place of natural raw materials like iron and lumber. Now we begin to see plastic automobiles, plastic airplanes, plastic houses, even to imagine plastic cities and to speak of the plastics age, as once we spoke of the iron age and then of the steel age. And the source of this amazing, versatile material is as free and as wide as air and sunshine.

For many years one of the great driving gears of the international trade machine was named textiles. The people who had invented and perfected textile-making machinery, especially at first the British, imported the raw fibrous materials, such as cotton and wool, made them into cloth, and exported the cloth to all parts of the world. Among the principal buyers were those who produced only the natural fibers and made no cloth for themselves. Anyone looking at this situation might have believed it was permanent. It represented a division of labor between peoples — those who had the suitable areas and climate to produce the fibers and those who had the textile machines to make the cloth. One result was that the common kinds of cloth were very cheap. And how else but by this division of labor and this exchange could the world be well and cheaply clothed?

Then the meddling chemists, with nothing better to do, and only to see if they could, found a way to make textiles without natural fibers — that is, without wool, flax, cotton, or silk. They could make it out of a chemical mess that lay at the cellular base of all plant life; and as they went on, they found they could make it out of coal and air and water, or out of sand. But they needed a machine, too; and impish mechanics obliged them by inventing a machine that is in fact an immense silkworm, to spin their sticky stuff into threads.

For a generation we have been staring, with a kind of stupid wonder, at the prodigious rise of the artificial textile industries, loath to accept the economic implications; so loath, in fact, that governments have subsidized with public funds — what? Not the artificial textile industries, but the culture of natural fibers, like cotton, because the producers were being damaged by the competition.

5

Until World War I, the first anxiety of any nation thinking of war was about nitrates. Without nitrates high explosives could not be made. The one natural source of this essential material in great quantities was a rainless Chilean desert on the western side of the Andes, where for many ages bird guano had been deposited until there was a bed of it two miles wide, two hundred miles long, and five feet deep. Before World War I, both Germany and England accumulated great piles of this Chilean guano, but not enough. No sooner had they begun to shoot it at one another than they realized that they had greatly underestimated the amount of high explosives they were going to need. The German Navy tried to blockade the Chilean coast, to keep England from getting any more. The British Navy had the same thought at the same time, and won.

Yet all of this was time and energy wasted. When Germany was cut off from the Chilean nitrates, she remembered that her scientists knew a way of filching nitrogen out of the free air. They got from the air all the nitrates they needed for the duration of the war, and since then all nations have been getting their nitrates from the air.

Only two or three years ago it would have seemed that a plan of grand strategy for a mechanized war could be based on rubber alone. No nation without rubber could go far with mechanized warfare. Its system of motor transport would breakdown. Indeed, Japan’s strategy was aimed at getting control of the rubber of Asia. Her success in cutting off both the United States and Great Britain from their principal sources of supply might have been for us a major military disaster. But fortunately, we already knew how to make artificial rubber. We had never done it, but we had the formulas, the chemical knowledge, and the materials. What materials? Petroleum is one. Alcohol is another. Petroleum comes out of the ground, and we happen to have more of it than anyone else in the world. But alcohol comes from wheat or corn or potatoes or cane. We can plant and reap it, as much as we need, and so can anyone else. We are going to use both for making rubber; and if the war continues for a year more — that is to say, if the necessity continues — we who were the largest buyers and consumers of rubber from Asia need never buy another pound of it there.

In the same way, a plan of grand strategy might have been based on oil. That in fact was done many times. There was a world struggle for oil. Possession and control of its sources was the great aim of power politics. Before oil it was coal. For nearly a century Britain’s superior coal measures were one of her four aces in the game of foreign policy.

Why are coal and oil so important? Because they contain and can be made to release solar energy that was caught and turned cold in the crust of the earth millions of years ago. One is solid. The other is fluid. They are so much alike in chemical nature that both can be made to do the same work. Yet neither coal nor oil is a source of energy. They only store it. The source is sunshine.

What so suddenly invested petroleum with its supreme importance was the arrival of the internal combustion engine. Motor transport and aviation both rest upon it.

Imagine, then, that all the oil wells of the world go dry. There is no more petroleum. In that event, should we have to abandon the internal combustion engine? Should we lose the power of wings and fall out of the sky? Not at all. Two things would happen, both of them relatively simple. The engineers would redesign the engine, and for this redesigned engine the chemist would design the fuel.

You understand, of course, what it means to say the engineers would redesign the engine. They might have to change the length of the piston stroke and the diameter of the cylinder and modify the carburetor, and so on. But do you understand so well what it means to say the chemist would design the fuel? Mark it. For upon that one point the age of alchemy revolves.

Hitherto man has acted on the outwardness of matter as he found it, not upon the inwardness of it. That is to say, he has accepted matter in its natural forms as nature left it, and has adapted his ends to the limitations of matter in those natural forms. Thus, petroleum as he found it was not the ideal fuel for the internal combustion engine; it was only the most abundant and the most available, and he adapted his engine to it.

Now, however, he acts upon the inwardness of matter, to change the form of it as he likes, so that, instead of adapting his ends to the means, he may adapt the means to his fantastic ends. He finds that matter in any one of its natural forms is what it is because its molecules have a certain internal atomic structure. That fact is no longer final. He can alter the fact.

He has never seen that internal structure of the molecule. Nevertheless, he can draw a picture of it. Then he makes the astonishing discovery that he can change the picture. That is to say, he can redesign the molecule. He can break it down and build it up again to another design; and as he does this to the molecule, the form of matter he wants is bound to appear.

Is it rubber he wants? Suppose there is not enough of it in the natural form or he has been cut off from the source of it. But he knows that rubber is rubber only because its molecules have a certain internal design. All around him is other matter full of molecules that can be redesigned; and when to the molecules of this other matter he has imparted the rubber design, lo! there is the rubber itself.

Is it energy he wants — energy in liquid form that can be carried about in tanks, like petroleum? He may have no petroleum of his own or, again, not enough of it. He notes that sunshine still falls upon the earth as it did when solar energy was being stored in coal and oil. From there he goes on to find that there is an annual catch and store of it in plant life. When he has made alcohol from the plant, he has solar energy again in liquid form. Thus he can reap it in the fields, instead of digging it from the ground.

There is more. Hitherto, when man for his ingenious ends has wanted a material that was very hard or one that was very tough, he has had to find the hardest or toughest substance that occurred in the natural form and make it do; but now he says only that he wants something that is so hard or something that is so tough, and that it must be able to resist heat and cold to certain degrees, and the chemist undertakes to produce it artificially. When he has produced it he gives it a name, and it is a name strange to nature. Again he has redesigned the molecule, and this time to a pattern nature never thought of.

And now do we know what we mean when we speak of raw materials? Do we mean matter in certain natural forms, as nature made them and where she accidentally put them? Or do we mean just matter, which is everywhere?

Man acting upon his environment to alter it and man acting upon matter to change its forms are as of two different species. Given now the carbohydrates, vegetable oils, the alcohols, sunshine, air, land, and water, it is possible for him to shape matter in whatever form he likes — or nearly so.

What vistas are these, to be widened and lengthened by the necessities of a war which, in so far as it represents a struggle for the sources of natural raw materials and for markets, may be already obsolete in time and meaning! If this time the human enigma does not blow himself off the earth, he may come to a future such as he has not dared to dream of, and, for all his folly, a future of his own making.