The war released a flood of repressed passions in nationalism. Great and small groups of submerged people asserted rights of self-determination and clothed themselves with frontiers and nationhood. Nearly all of these, together also with old countries whose character until then had been agricultural, were concurrently seized with the thought of economic independence—that is to say, with the thought of having machines and industries of their own, for they had seen a new thing. Industrial nations and none other were powerful in the world. Nations without machines were helpless, subject, in fact, to those that had them.
Enormously stimulated in its function of reproduction by the onset of this human idea, the machine broke bounds. No one now has any control of it.
Only a few years ago Great Britain alone controlled it. She had a monopoly of its power and use by right of having been the first to develop it, and she was for a while the only nation having a large surplus of manufactures to sell in foreign countries. Then came Germany, France, and Belgium. Of these Germany was Great Britain’s most aggressive rival, making nearly all of the same things and most of them cheaper. After 1870 the United States developed industry very fast but for twenty years more her exports were principally agricultural because she herself consumed the entire product of her machines, besides importing manufactured goods from Europe in exchange for meat and grain and raw cotton. It was not until about 1890 that American machine-products began to invade the markets of the world in a large way. And at about the same time Japan appeared as an industrial nation, having in a few years equipped herself with Western machines and trained her imitative hand to mind them.
Such, roughly, was the economic state of the world at the outbreak of the War. The powerfully industrialized nations were four in Europe, counting little Belgium; one in the West; and one in the East—six altogether, representing hardly more than one-fifth of the world’s total population.
If we regard only the countries where the industrial population had so outrun the native food-supply that the sale of manufactures in foreign lands to pay for food had either become, or was believed to be, a vital transaction, then we count out the United States. This country is still self-nourished. That leaves only five, and the competition among these five for markets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to be instructed in wanting, for private pathways by land and sea to the sources of food, for access to the raw materials required by their machines, was already desperate and dangerous. Between two of them it was deadly.
Even then it was so. Since then the machine has multiplied tremendously where its habitat was and has gone migrating, besides, all over the earth.
In those six countries that were already intensively industrialized what appears? Their machine equipment has greatly increased. During the War it increased for obvious reasons. God was on the side of the most machines. Since the War it has continued to increase for other reasons. One reason was peculiar to Germany. There the building of furnaces, factories, and machine-works by a dynastic method, as the pyramids were built, without credit or gold, simply by command of the industrialists over labour and material, was a way of baffling the Allied creditors. Another reason was peculiar to France. Restoring the industries of the devastated regions meant building them a second time, since they had been already once reproduced elsewhere in France during the War. But the reason over all lay in that fixed idea of economic necessity, not changed in the least by anything that had happened, only now more desperate than ever, owing both to the intensified competition of the older countries among themselves and to the spread of the machine into other countries.
How the competition among themselves has been intensified may be illustrated in the case of textiles as between Great Britain and France. Before the War both imported raw cotton and exported fabrications of cotton; but, whereas Great Britain exported principally the cotton cloth of universal commerce, France exported special products representing her genius for style and artistry. Now, however, having made large additions to her general textile equipment, France feels obliged to compete directly with Great Britain in cotton-cloth of common commerce. To do this she must extend her foreign trade parallel to Great Britain’s and divide the markets hitherto dominated by the British. As with cotton-cloth, so with other manufactures, particularly those of iron and steel, wherein France proposes to compete and is equipped to compete with both Germany and Great Britain as never before. Each step she takes in this direction augments her economic necessity, for now almost the last thing you would expect to see in France is taking place. The native population as a whole is static, but its character is changing. The industrial part of it is growing; the agricultural part is waning. People are deserting the fields to embrace industrial life—to mind machines. In every city there is a housing problem; public credit is employed to build small dwellings for the wage-earners; yet in the country, two hours from Paris, you will see houses empty and going to ruin, whole rural villages in the way to be abandoned, vineyards perishing for want of care, fields going to grass instead of grain. Their industrial power is rising; their agricultural power is falling. Before the War they were, or might have been, self-nourishing on their own soil like the people of the United States. That precious security they cast away. In place of it they take on the anxieties of empire. They must impose upon Morocco the blessings of European civilization in order to have an outlet there for the surplus of their machines.
Dramatic are the migrations of the machine and not unlike the migrations of natural species, men and beasts, in search of food. The machine seeks either cheaper raw material or people to mind its processes.
There is Italy, with a population greater than that of France, growing half-a-million a year. It is the most fecund race in Europe. Suddenly the Italians wake up and are resolved upon an industrial career. Before the War this thought was dim among them. In the crisis it took shape. Since the War it has become an enthusiasm, and now smoke-towers are rising very fast. Definitely they have turned their minds from agriculture to industry, not merely in order that they may become self-supplied with manufactures instead of buying them from other countries with lemons and olive oil, but in order to grow rich and powerful in foreign trade. They propose hereafter and progressively to exchange machine-wares for food. Italy will be a formidable rival for Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, who are already beginning to feel it.