The arming of the African negro carries its appalling possibilities on its face. Its development cannot possibly avoid the gravest complication of the industrial problem. It is the Servile State in its most sinister form; and unless Europe is itself ready for slavery it will stop this reintroduction of slavery for the purposes of militarism.
The other device has also its self-defeating element. To support an imperialist Poland means a hostile Russia; yet Poland, wedged in between a hostile Slav mass on the one side and a hostile Teutonic one on the other, herself compounded of Russian, German, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Jewish elements, ruled largely by a landowning aristocracy when the countries on both sides have managed to transfer the great estates to the peasants, is as likely, in these days, to be a military liability as a military asset.
These things are not irrelevant to the problem of turning military power to economic account: they are of the very essence of the problem.
Not less so is this consideration: If France should for political reasons persist in a policy which means a progressive reduction in the productivity of Europe, that policy would be at its very roots directly contrary to the vital interests of England. The foregoing pages have explained why the increasing population of these islands, that live by selling coal or its products, are dependent upon the high productivity of the outside world. France is self-supporting and has no such pre-occupation. Already the divergence is seen in the case of the Russian policy. Britain direly needs the wheat of Russia to reduce the cost of living—or improve the value of what she has to sell, which is very nearly the same thing. France does not need Russian foodstuffs, and in terms of narrow self-interest (cutting her losses in Czarist bonds) can afford to be indifferent to the devastation of Russia. As soon as this divergence reaches a certain degree, rupture becomes inevitable.
The mainspring of French policy during the last two years has been fear—fear of the economic revival of Germany which might be the beginning of a military revival. The measures necessary to check German economic revival inevitably increase German resentment, which is taken as proof of the need for increasingly severe measures of repression. Those measures are tending already to deprive France of her most powerful military Allies. That fact still further increases the burden that will be thrown upon her. Such burdens must inevitably make very large deductions from the ‘profits’ of her new conquests.
Note in view of these circumstances some further difficulties of turning those conquests to account. Take the iron mines of Lorraine.[132] France has now within her borders what is, as already noted, the geographical centre of Continental industry. How shall she turn that fact to account?
For the iron to become wealth at all, for France to become the actual centre of European industry, there must be a European industry: the railroads and factories and steamship lines as consumers of the iron must once more operate. To do that they in their turn must have their market in the shape of active consumption on the part of the millions of Europe. In other words the Continent must be economically restored. But that it cannot be while Germany is economically paralysed. Germany’s industry is the very keystone of the European industry and agriculture—whether in Russia, Poland, the Balkans, or the Near East—which is the indispensable market of the French iron.[133] Even if we could imagine such a thing as a reconstruction of Europe on lines that would in some wonderful way put seventy or eighty million Germans into a secondary place—involving as it would vast redistributions of population—the process obviously would take years or generations. Meantime Europe goes to pieces. ‘Men will not always die quietly’ as Mr Keynes puts it. What is to become of French credit while France is suppressing Bolshevik upheavals in Poland or Hungary caused by the starvation of cities through the new economic readjustments? Europe famishes now for want of credit. But credit implies a certain dependence upon the steady course of future events, some assurance, for instance, that this particular railway line to which advances are made will not find itself, in a year or two’s time, deprived of its traffic in the interest of economic rearrangements resulting from an attempt to re-draw the economic map of Europe. Nor can such re-drawing disregard the present. It is no good telling peasants who have not ploughs or reapers or who cannot get fertilisers because their railroad has no locomotives, that a new line running on their side of the new frontier will be built ten or fifteen years hence. You cannot stop the patients breathing ‘for just a few hours’ while experiments are made with vital organs. The operation must adapt itself to the fact that all the time he must breathe. And to the degree to which we attempt violently to re-direct the economic currents, does the security upon which our credit depends decline.[134]
There are other considerations. A French journalist asks plaintively: ‘If we want the coal why don’t we go in and take it’—by the occupation of the Ruhr. The implication is that France could get the coal for nothing. Well, France has taken over the Saar Valley. By no means does she get the coal for nothing. The miners have to be paid. France tried paying them at an especially low rate. The production fell off; the miners were discontented and underfed. They had to be paid more. Even so the Saar has been ‘very restless’ under French control, and the last word, as we know, will rest with the men. Miners who feel they are working for the enemy of their fatherland are not going to give a high production. It is a long exploded illusion that slave labour—labour under physical compulsion—is a productive form of labour. Its output invariably is small. So assuredly France does not get this coal for nothing. And from the difference between the price which it costs her as owner of the mines and administrator of their workers, and that which she would pay if she had to buy the coal from the original owners and administrators (if there is a difference on the credit side at all) has to be deducted the ultimate cost of defence and of the political complications that that has involved. Precise figures are obviously not available; but it is equally obvious that the profit of seizure is microscopic.
Always does the fundamental dilemma remain. France will need above all, if she is to profit by these raw materials of European industry, markets, and again markets. But markets mean that the iron which has been captured must be returned to the nation from which it was taken, on conditions economically advantageous to that nation. A central Europe that is consuming large quantities of metallurgical products is a Central Europe growing in wealth and power and potentially dangerous unless reconciled. And reconciliation will include economic justice, access to the very ‘property’ that has been seized.
The foregoing is not now, as it was when the present author wrote in similar terms a decade since, mere speculation or hypothesis. Our present difficulties with reference to the indemnity or reparations, the fall in the exchanges, or the supply of coal, are precisely of the order just indicated. The conqueror is caught in the grip of just those difficulties in turning conquest to economic account upon which The Great Illusion so repeatedly insisted.