If the German menace was due in part at least to such causes as ‘poor access to the sea,’ the absence of any assurance as to future provision for an expanding population, what measures were proposed for the removal of those causes?
None whatever. Not only so, but any effort towards a frank facing of the economic difficulty was resisted by the very people who had previously urged the economic factors of the conflict, as a ‘sordid’ interpretation of that conflict. We have seen what happened, for instance, in the case of Admiral Mahan. He urged that the competition for undeveloped territory and raw materials lay behind the political struggle. So be it; replies some one; let us see whether we cannot remove that economic cause of conflict, whether indeed there is any real economic conflict at all. And the Admiral then retorts that economics have nothing to do with it. To Mr Frederic Harrison ‘The Great Illusion policy is childish and mischievous rubbish.’ What was that policy? To deny the existence of the German or other aggressiveness? The whole policy was prompted by the very fact of that danger. Did the policy suggest that we should simply yield to German political pretensions? Again, as we have seen, such a course was rejected with every possible emphasis. The one outstanding implication of the policy was that while arming we must find a basis of co-operation by which both peoples could live.
In any serious effort to that end, one overpowering question had to be answered by Englishmen who felt some responsibility for the welfare of their people. Would that co-operation, giving security to others, demand the sacrifice of the interest or welfare of their own people? The Great Illusion replied, No, and set forth the reasons for that reply. And the setting-forth of those reasons made the book an ‘appeal to avarice against patriotism,’ an attempt ‘to restore the blessed hour of money getting.’ Eminent Nonconformist divines and patriotic stockbrokers joined hands in condemning the appalling sordidness of the demonstration which might have led to a removal of the economic causes of international quarrel.
It is not true to say that in the decade preceding Armageddon the alternatives to fighting Germany were exhausted, and that nothing was left but war or submission. We simply had not tried the remedy of removing the economic excuse for aggression. The fact that Germany did face these difficulties and much future uncertainty was indeed urged by those of the school of Mr Harrison and Lord Roberts as a conclusive argument against the possibility of peace or any form of agreement with her. The idea that agreement should reach to such fundamental things as the means of subsistence seemed to involve such an invasion of sovereignty as not even to be imaginable.
To show that such an agreement would not ask a sacrifice of vital national interest, that indeed the economic advantages which could be exacted by military preponderance were exceedingly small or non-existent, seemed the first indispensable step towards bringing some international code of economic right within the area of practical politics, of giving it any chance of acceptance by public opinion. Yet the effort towards that was disparaged and derided as ‘materialistic.’
One hoped at least that this disparagement of material interest as a motive in international politics might give us a peace settlement which would be free from it. But economic interest which is ‘sordid’ when appealed to as a means of preserving the peace, becomes a sacred egoism when invoked on behalf of a policy which makes war almost inevitable.
Why did it create such bitter resentment before the War to suggest that we should discuss the economic grounds of international conflict—why before the War were many writers who now demand that discussion so angry at it being suggested? Among the very hostile critics of The Great Illusion—hostile mainly on the ground that it misread the motive forces in international politics—was Mr J. L. Garvin. Yet his own first post-war book is entitled: The Economic Foundations of Peace, and its first Chapter Summary begins thus:—
‘A primary war, largely about food and raw materials: inseparable connection of the politics and economics of the peace.’
And his first paragraph contains the following:—
‘The war with many names was in one main aspect a war about food supply and raw materials. To this extent it was Germany’s fight to escape from the economic position of interdependence without security into which she had insensibly fallen—to obtain for herself independent control of an ample share in the world’s supplies of primary resources. The war meant much else, but it meant this as well and this was a vital factor in its causes.’