A brilliant Belgian economist suggests that only the most efficient equipment will survive, and only enough of that to satisfy the natural demand for goods. All the rest must be abandoned because there will be no profit in working it. Well, it remains to be seen if people will abandon their machines without a struggle, purely for rational reasons. Much more is it likely that the higher cost of working the less efficient equipment will be compensated by a lower wage-rate, unemployment being the workers’ alternative. Moreover, if all the inefficient and unnecessary machines were scrapped that would mean only postponement of the sequel. The competition would begin all over again.
There are those who suggest that we are facing toward the mercantile system of the Middle Ages, when it was the custom for each nation jealously to protect its home-market from the competitive handicrafts of other nations, and to prohibit or punitively tax the exportation of raw material to rival countries. So we are. To say it is merely to indicate the rock upon which, if nothing happens, the ship of trade is bound to wreck herself.
A growing light on the actions of trade as it is organized by the industrial powers now impels nations hitherto agricultural to found industries of their own. As producers of foodstuffs and raw materials to be exchanged for machine-products they came to have a sense of being exploited. In academic theory this was an exchange by which the industrial nation satisfied its food wants and the agricultural nation its industrial wants, to mutual advantage. But how came the industrial nation also to acquire wealth by the transaction? Performing the preferred industrial task, it got not only its food but a profit over. What else could it mean but that after a series of years the industrial nation should come to have large interest-bearing investments in the agricultural country, owning its railroads, tramways, water works, and banks? What else could it mean but that the richest country in foreign investments was the one that had been for the longest time engaged in exchanging the surplus product of its machines for the food and raw materials of other countries? How was it that those other countries, after having served her for many years with food and raw materials, invariably owed her a great deal of money? Or, if you approach it from the other point of view, you find in the economic literature of industrial nations a certain finished doctrine, which is that the exchange of manufactured goods for food and raw materials is a business that pays. It is not primarily a vital transaction. It becomes vital by extension—that is to say, when in the course of time the industrial population has increased beyond the native food supply. But in the beginning the motive is gain. Nakedly, it is an exchange of skilled labour for unskilled labour, to the enrichment of the former; it is a division of labour among nations on a kind of caste plan.
There is much to be said for it. In no other way could civilization have been spread so fast; by no other method could the world have become so rich in a few years. There was much to be said, also, for piracy. It diffused, manners, customs, and wealth; it made peoples acquainted with one another; it made a flat world round and laid the foundations of modern commerce. In the modern case all difficulty begins when the peoples to whom the less profitable tasks have been allotted become intelligently dissatisfied and resolve to change their status, as the American colonists did, as the Japanese did, as now all lusty nations are doing, last of all the Chinese.
Modern trade evolved from piracy. There was a time when all transfer of goods between nations was by joyous might. It is pleasant to believe that the cause of the decline of piracy was a rise in the moral sense of mankind. It is more likely to have been the other way—that as piracy declined for rational reasons rules to govern commercial conduct became necessary. To enforce the rules became everyone’s duty. To break them was punishable. From this would germinate a moral sense. Piracy was bound to fail. On a large scale, continuous and competitive, it simply was not feasible. Competition ruined it.
There was a marginal time in which one was either pirate or trader, agreeably to circumstance. The early Greek in his dangerous ship never knew which he was; nor did anyone else. He took when the taking was good; when it was not, he bartered. The Romans finally abolished piracy in the Mediterranean, but on the high seas it was the great romantic enterprize down to a very recent time. Some of its heroes are venerated as daring navigators, pathbreakers of empire. It takes some effort to remember that trees are still standing that were already old when the world was a place where finding was keeping. If what you found was in the possession of savages or heathens, you exchanged for it the hope of civilization, maybe a few glass beads. Toward the end, this wonderful business began to be hedged about with restrictions. You had to be careful not to take anything forcibly from people who had treaties of amity with your own country, for if you did they made trouble for you at home, diplomatically, and you might even be hanged at the end of an otherwise glorious voyage.
But if you swindled them in trade, that was all right. Naturally, the first theory of trade was to give the least and get the most. There was else no point to it.
The significance of trade has fundamentally changed in our time. What was a private adventure has become a national necessity, vital to the existing form of the principal industrial states of the world. And yet that first rude theory of it, representing the step from piracy to commerce, universally survives. This, at last, is the crucial fact.
It has been impossible to part with the notion that there must be gain in trade—a profit on one side beyond the mutual satisfaction of unlike wants with unlike goods. Hence the term, balance of trade, meaning the balance in your favour, or against you, from the transactions of commerce. The rule is that the industrial nations come out each year with a balance in their favour. The countries with whom they have been exchanging machine-made goods for food and raw materials owe them money. This simply means that the industrial nations charge more for what they sell than they pay for what they buy. Hence the gain. That is how they get rich. It is more than a rule: it is the very principle of trade; and if you say there is any other principle the commercial mind becomes instantly stark. What would activate trade if not the hope of gain?
Nevertheless, trade on that principle is bound to fail, as piracy failed, and for the same practical reason. On a vast scale, with unlimited participation, it is not continuously feasible. Every nation cannot have a favourable trade-balance. So long as three or four nations had a monopoly of machines and machine-craft, it could be managed; it could even assume such colossal proportions as to create the illusion of being permanent as the way of the world. That monopoly is broken. The machine is increasingly a common possession. Its power is dispersed, and there is much new and unbidden ecstasy in the exercise of it. And whereas it was that a few nations exploited many, what now opens to view is the prospect of all nations simultaneously engaged in the effort to exploit one another. Every frontier a trade wall. Each nation forbidding others to do unto it that which it is bent upon doing to them. So we return to the middle of the sixteenth century, no wiser than the British were when the Parliament voted An Act Avoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made by Handicraftsmen Beyond the Seas (5 Eliz. c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 428-429), 1562. It reads: