Poland perceives her destiny to be industrial: she has already a large surplus of manufactured goods to sell. Likewise Czechoslovakia. These are instances of new countries. Spain and Greece are importing machinery, and Spain is so anxious to develop industry that she considers paying a bounty out of the public treasury on exports of textiles. India, whose historic economic function had been to send raw cotton to Great Britain and buy cotton cloth from Manchester, now consumes half her own raw cotton in her native mills; she not only satisfies three-quarters of her own want for cotton cloth but is beginning actually to export that commodity, even to the United States. This will seem very wasteful, indeed, when you pause to set it against the historical background of the United States. For a long time we exported raw cotton and imported cotton cloth. That was to have been the pattern of our economic life as a British colony; we were to produce only raw materials, ship them to Great Britain and buy from her the surplus of her machines. We were forbidden, in fact, to weave cloth for sale or to have iron mills. Now we are an industrial nation; we consume more and more of our own raw cotton and export enormous quantities of cotton cloth. Ultimately we shall have no raw cotton at all to sell; our mills will require the whole of our annual crop; we shall have nothing but cotton cloth to sell. To whom shall we sell it? Not to the Indians; they wish to make their own. Probably not to the Egyptians. The Japanese manufacturers of cotton goods have recently invaded the Egyptian market that was formerly Great Britain’s own, and are underselling the British there. You would think China would be Japan’s natural outlet for cotton goods. So it is. The difficulty is that Japan must be looking further because China is beginning to supply herself.
The Chinese instance is poignant. A few years ago—until the War, in fact—China exported food and raw materials and imported manufactured goods—nothing else to speak of either way. This was as the Western industrial nations wished it to be. So anxious were they to have it so that they bound China by treaty not to put tariff barriers against the goods they wished to sell in the Chinese markets, except by mutual consent—that is to say, with their consent.
The War suspended this thraldom. The Chinese imported machines and began to make their own things, especially cloth. Power-looms appeared as by magic. And after the War, they continued to appear. During three years after the War the number trebled, and in 1922, the table of Chinese imports and exports presented a strange face. Among her imports were machines and machine-parts; also semimanufactured goods to be finished in Chinese factories. And one-fifth of her total exports consisted of manufactured goods. China an exporter of machine products!
And so up and down the earth. In Brazil, where there was hardly any visible production of artificial things before 1914, the whole outlook has changed. That country is now able from her own machines to meet the whole of her want for matches, textiles, footgear, wallpaper, phonograph-discs, hardware, hats, and playing cards, and will soon be self-supplied with practically everything she needs.
The Colonial System that was to have answered forever Great Britain’s need for raw materials and food in exchange for machine-products will not hold in that character. In India the revolt is political; elsewhere it is peaceably economic. Canada is already powerfully machined; she is exporting motor-cars. Australia, going in the same direction, is beginning to export shoes. The Union of South Africa takes steps to subsidize local industry. Ireland no sooner gains control of her economic life than she puts a tariff-wall around herself to limit the sale of foreign goods, meaning British goods as well, thinking thereby to foster infant industries.
Well, everyone now is doing that. The old industrial countries, too, are protecting themselves against one another’s goods, the last to come to it being Great Britain herself. For more than half-a-century she was the protagonist of free trade, abhoring tariffs, because she was paramount in machine-craft and could beat her rivals both in their own markets and in her own. That advantage having departed from her, she is driven to tariff-protection: she puts up barriers against other people’s goods if they are too cheap, because they are too cheap, and calls it Safeguarding Home Industries.
V
THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS
What does it mean? Can there be too many desirable and useful things? Can things be too cheap? You would say No. Surely, so long as any human want remains unsatisfied, things cannot be either too plentiful or too cheap? But there is another dimension.
Everything that is not still or dead must exist in a state of rhythmic tension. It is true of the plant, it is true of the animal, it is true of each race of plants and each race of animals, it is true of the kingdom of plants against the kingdom of animals. It is true of people, as individuals, as races, as a species. And it is true, also, of the machine.
In the living organism growth of tissue at a normal rate consonant with the rhythm is vital. A wild growth of that same tissue will be fatal. In the aggregate of life there is equilibrium among millions of different forms, each form striving but never succeeding and is possessing every other form and taking the world. The oyster, if unhindered, would displace every other living thing on the earth in maybe ten generations, and then, of course, perish for want of space in which to contain itself. What hinders the oyster and at the same time preserves it is that principle of tension in nature, without which it would be impossible for innumerable forms and varieties of life, the relations of which to one another are reciprocal, neutral, hostile, anonymous, to exist together all in one great taut pattern.