In this new political dogma of an absolute economic necessity to import food and raw materials in exchange for manufactures the ancient myth-wish reappears. The machine does not abolish the curse of toil. It was not the escape men sought. But it does create a preferred task.
Traditionally, the peasant-task has been despised: it bore the curse direct. And, when the machine made it possible for many to embrace instead what was deemed the lesser affliction of industrial labour gregariously performed in cities, the impulse thereto was headlong.
Hence the rise of that angular phenomenon called the industrial nation—a nation able to buy its food, therefore delivered from the fate of peasantry and for that reason entitled to consider itself of higher caste than agricultural nations.
Hence the tumescent city as one of the most alarming appearances of our time.
Hence, also, that idea of economic necessity, which, getting control of the political mind of Europe, inevitably involved the world in a machine-war. What made that war so terrifying, so destructive, so extensive, was the power of the machine—an inconceivable power except as it disclosed itself from day to day. No one beholding the event from a firmamental point of view could have supposed it was a war between races of men. Man in contrast with the machines he served was pitifully insignificant.
In Germany the task of bending the country’s industrial equipment to the uses of war was assigned to a man who possessed one of the very brilliant Jewish minds in the world. In him were combined the three high characteristics of his race, which are loyalty, intellectual realism, and dreaming imagination. His practical job was more complex than that of the Chief of Staff. Yet his mind was not wholly occupied with this care. His critical faculties and his imagination were always free.
Reflecting on the economic meaning of the war, he was led to examine the essential character of international trade, and so perceived clearly how wasteful, preposterous, and dangerous a great deal of it was—Germany pressing the surplus product of her machines for sale in Great Britain, the British doing likewise in Germany, both competing at home and abroad with the industrial surplus of the United States, ships passing on the seas with cargoes of similar goods endlessly duplicated, and all the machine-craft nations seeking peasant-nations to be exploited for food in exchange for manufactures. It was true in this way the world had been growing richer in things, and yet the cost was frightful. The resort to force was a confession that international trade was bankrupt in reason and understanding.
He was competent to reach a conclusion standing himself at the head of one of Europe’s great industries. And he made a dream. It was that, when the war had come to an end and people were themselves again, they would see the vital importance to civilization of dividing among them the work of the world agreeably to their special aptitudes and the facts of environment—those to produce a surplus of whatever it was they had a genius for making and the materials ready; these others another kind of thing in which their skill and situation gave them an advantage; and so on through the whole series of natural and artificial things with which human wants are satisfied. Thus duplication and strife would be eliminated. Not only would there be enough of everything: from the elimination of senseless waste in private and public war there would be a saving of power and capital sufficient to water all the deserts of the earth and recreate man’s vistas here.
As a dream, it was most alluring. As a plan it was worthless, for it contained two fatal assumptions, namely, that you could always find a Solomon to administer it and that people would submit to the benevolent tyranny of his wisdom. He himself was destined by his end to illustrate how people really behave. Shortly after the close of the war he was murdered in the name of fanatic nationalism.
It was a sign.