Speaking of the need of Russian agriculture for German industry, Mr. Maynard Keynes, who has worked out the statistics revealing the relative position of Germany to the rest of Europe, writes:—
‘It is impossible geographically and for many other reasons for Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans to undertake it—we have neither the incentive nor the means for doing the work on a sufficient scale. Germany, on the other hand, has the experience, the incentive, and to a large extent, the materials for furnishing the Russian peasant with the goods of which he has been starved for the past five years, for reorganising the business of transport and collection, and so for bringing into the world’s pool, for the common advantage, the supplies from which we are now disastrously cut off.... If we oppose in detail every means by which Germany or Russia can recover their material well-being, because we feel a national, racial, or political hatred for their populations or their governments, we must be prepared to face the consequences of such feelings. Even if there is no moral solidarity between the newly-related races of Europe, there is an economic solidarity which we cannot disregard. Even now, the world markets are one. If we do not allow Germany to exchange products with Russia and so feed herself, she must inevitably compete with us for the produce of the New World. The more successful we are in snapping economic relations between Germany and Russia, the more we shall depress the level of our own economic standards and increase the gravity of our own domestic problems.’[4]
It is not merely the productivity of Russia which is involved. Round Germany as a central support the rest of the European economic system grouped itself, and upon the prosperity and enterprise of Germany the prosperity of the rest of the Continent mainly depended. Germany was the best customer of Russia, Norway, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria-Hungary; she was the second best customer of Great Britain, Sweden, and Denmark; and the third best customer of France. She was the largest source of supply to Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria; and the second largest source of supply to Great Britain, Belgium, and France. Britain sent more experts to Germany than to any other country in the world except India, and bought more from her than any other country in the world except the United States. There was no European country except those west of Germany which did not do more than a quarter of their total trade with her; and in the case of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Poland, the proportion was far greater. To retard or prevent the economic restoration of Germany means retarding the economic reconstruction of Europe.
This gives us a hint of the deep causes underlying the present divergence of French and British policy with reference to the economic reconstruction of Russia and Central Europe. A Britain of sixty or seventy millions faced by the situation with reference to America that has just been touched upon, might well find that the development of the resources of Russia, Siberia, and the Near East—even at the cost of dividing the profits thereof in terms of industrial development with Germany, each supplying that for which it was best suited—was the essential condition of food and social peace. France has no such pre-occupation. Her concern is political: the maintenance of a military predominance on which she believes her political security to depend, an object that might well be facilitated by the political disintegration of Europe even though it involved its economic disintegration.
That brings us to the political factor in the decline in productivity. From it we may learn something of the moral factor, which is the ultimate condition of any co-operation whatsoever.
The relationship of the political to the economic situation is illustrated most vividly, perhaps, in the case of Austria. Mr. Hoover, in testimony given to a United States Senate Committee, has declared bluntly that it is no use talking of loans to Austria which imply future security, if the present political status is to be maintained, because that status has rendered the old economic activities impossible. Speaking before the Committee, he said:—
‘The political situation in Austria I hesitate to discuss, but it is the cause of the trouble. Austria has now no hope of being anything more than a perpetual poorhouse, because all her lands that produce food have been taken from her. This, I will say, was done without American inspiration. If this political situation continues, and Austria is made a perpetual mendicant, the United States should not provide the charity. We should make the loan suggested with full notice that those who undertake to continue Austria’s present status must pay the bill. Present Austria faces three alternatives—death, migration, or a complete industrial diversion and re-organization. Her economic rehabilitation seems impossible after the way she was broken up at the Peace Conference. Her present territory will produce only enough food for three months, and she has now no factories which might produce products to be exchanged for food.’[5]
To realise what can really be accomplished by statesmanship that has a soul above such trifles as food and fuel, when it sets its hand to map-drawing, one should attempt to visualise the state of Vienna to-day. Mr A. G. Gardiner, the English journalist, has sketched it thus:—
‘To conceive its situation one must imagine London suddenly cut off from all the sources of its life, no access to the sea, frontiers of hostile Powers all round it, every coalfield of Yorkshire or South Wales or Scotland in foreign hands, no citizen able to travel to Birmingham or Manchester without a passport, the mills it had financed in Lancashire taken from it, no coal to burn, no food to eat, and—with its shilling down in value to a farthing—no money to buy raw materials for its labour, industry at a standstill, hundreds of thousands living (or dying) on charity, nothing prospering except the vile exploiters of misery, the traffickers in food, the traffickers in vice. That is the Vienna which the peace criminals have made.
‘Vienna was the financial and administrative centre of fifty million of people. It financed textile factories, paper manufacturing, machine works, beet growing, and scores of other industries in German Bohemia. It owned coal mines at Teschen. It drew its food from Hungary. From every quarter of the Empire there came to Vienna the half-manufactured products of the provinces for the finishing processes, tailoring, dyeing, glass-working, in which a vast population found employment.