Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

The Economic Struggle

Meanwhile the economic struggle between the white nations is threatening to develop with a severity of competition which is alarming to all students of international affairs. Great Britain and the United States of America are bound to be competitors in the world market against nations able to produce manufactured articles at far less cost owing to cheap labour. The United States will undoubtedly make a serious effort to overcome this difficulty by cutting into the international trade with surplus products on a small margin of profit, but whether they succeed or not does not matter very much to the life and prosperity of their people, who are self-supporting and self-contained. For Great Britain it is literally a matter of life and death as a great power. To feed their population England, Scotland and Wales have to import more than nine months’ food supplies, which can only be paid for by the export of raw material and manufactured goods. In the same way they must pay for the essential services of the nation, including the Army, Navy, and Civil Service. At the present time Great Britain has succeeded in regaining her export trade to over seventy per cent. of its pre-war standard of money values; but that is not nearly enough now that her population, ten years after, has increased by nearly two millions, and now that the cost of life and production is very much higher than in 1913 owing to the burden of taxation, the higher rate of wages, and the lower purchasing power of English money.

There is no certainty that Great Britain will be able to maintain her present standard of export trade, apart altogether from increasing it. In various classes of goods, in which for half a century the British people had something like a monopoly in foreign markets, there is no longer that advantage. India is boycotting cotton fabrics made in Lancashire and has her own mills hard at work. Italy is producing cotton goods at much lower prices than she could formerly buy them in England, owing to the development of water power which relieves her of the price of British coal—a severe loss to the Welsh coalfields—and cheap labour. In steel and iron England is losing her supremacy. Germany and France separately have eaten into this big industry. Together, by a working arrangement between the Ruhr and Lorraine, they will put up a combination of power which may deal a knock-out blow to British steel works. Already, owing to the cheapness of German contracts, many British blast furnaces are closing down and the ugly notice is going up: “No hands wanted.” It is discouraging to read the statistics of British trade each month recording “stagnation” or “quietude” or “a gloomy outlook” in many great industries. It is alarming to an Englishman to have a vision of future years when conditions may be worse than this owing to the conditions of labour in competing nations.