Trade
I shall never forget the tones of hoarse satisfaction with which a vendor of the Evening News disturbed the twilight of a May evening in London, triumphantly proclaiming a "Great Troop Train Disaster." I had often noticed with what apparent joy the newspapers announced the sinking of a British cruiser; with what entirely neutral delight they welcomed or invented the report of Terrible Slaughter on either side. But somehow that hoarse and rufous man with the loose lip remained in my memory and became for me a type of one element in the population to which war was not unwelcome; the journalistic element that lives by exploiting the sadistic curiosity, the craving for mean excitements, and all the gladiatorial instinct of the modern world.[18] It soon became clear that the newspapers were not alone in the commercial exploitation of war. They were not even the worst offenders. The publishers were hurriedly producing volume after volume of faked memoirs badly written by imaginary governesses. The production of spurious memoirs and "autobiographies," even if they are skilfully composed, is always grossly immoral; and of the specimens occasioned by this war one may say that if they had been genuine it would have been possible to attribute the low morality of some Germanic princes to the literary style of the English governesses who had had a share in their education. The catchpenny manœuvres of publishers are really only a branch of journalism,[19] and such trivial offences were not, after all, unexpected, because the very profession of journalism is to take advantage. But the journalist is a man of straw who shows which way the wind blows, and his raucous exultation over disaster was the manifest symbol of a commercial exploitation of war by tradesmen and speculators which soon became sensible from one end of belligerent Europe to the other. Like the Vali of Aleppo, I am not good at statistics. It is well known however without the assistance of a mathematician that in England during the winter of 1915, when the cost of living had already risen by nearly 50 per cent, wholesale dealers often kept provisions of all sorts rotting in their stores rather than break the artificial scarcity they had created; farmers would not sell fresh eggs when the price was twopence-halfpenny, because they knew that in a week or two the price for the same eggs would have risen to threepence. Here is a cartoon from a Hungarian paper[20] showing the bloated profiteer of The Sugar Trust laughing at the women who feebly attack his barricade of sugar loaves. I mention it here because it is sufficiently remote from English affairs, and because it happens to come to hand, and because it is a good fragment of evidence, there being no reason why sugar should be scarce in Hungary as an immediate result of the war. And from every country between England and Hungary, from every country in Europe, can be heard the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.[21]
§ 6
Trade in Time of Peace
It would not however be correct to infer that the sacrifice of national welfare to commercial manœuvres is a condition peculiar to war. Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require. And it is with all the selfishness of the artist that it performs its usual operations. Among all the unpublished detail of modern life hardly any class of facts is more disquieting than that of commercial procedure and achievement. The subject is too large to be reviewed in less than a volume; and I can do no more here than suggest a few instances that might be acquired by anyone who devotes his time to not reading the daily papers.
The distribution and exchange of commodities are necessary to the existence of the State; so necessary that it might be supposed that their regulation would be one of the primary functions of government. Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity;[22] and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism. But trade in itself is a necessary aliment of the State, and its abuses ought not to be beyond remedy.
A few of these abuses are fairly obvious without a full inquiry, and may be illustrated here because their existence in time of peace may throw light on the operations of trade in belligerent states, and indirectly, by suggesting a few of the results of war, may lead us to some of its motives and occasions. Such abuses may be most easily identified in opposition to the national rights which they infringe.