That predominant political and military power is important to exact wealth is shown by the inability of the Allies to turn their power to really profitable account; notably by the failure of France to alleviate her financial distress by adequate reparations—even adequate quantities of coal—from Germany; and by the failure of the Allied statesmen as a whole, wielding a concentration of power greater perhaps than any known in history to arrest an economic disintegration, which is not only the cause of famine and vast suffering, but is a menace to Allied interest, particularly to the economic security of Britain.
The causes of this impotence are both mechanical and moral. If another is to render active service in the production of wealth for us—particularly services of any technical complexity in industry, finance, commerce—he must have strength for that activity, knowledge, and the instruments. But all those things can be turned against us as means of resistance to our coercion. To the degree to which we make him strong for our service we make him strong for resistance to our will. As resistance increases we are compelled to use an increasing proportion of what we obtain from him in protecting ourselves against him. Energies cancel each other, indemnities must be used in preparation for the next war. Only voluntary co-operation can save this waste and create an effective combination for the production of wealth that can be utilised for the preservation of life.
6
The Ultimate Moral Factor
The problem is not merely one of foreign politics or international relationship. The passions which obscure the real nature of the process by which men live are present in the industrial struggle also, and—especially in the case of communities situated as is the British—make of the national and international order one problem.
It is here suggested that:—
Into the processes which maintain life within the nation an increasing measure of consent and acquiescence by all parties must enter: physical coercion becomes increasingly impotent to ensure them. The problem of declining production by (inter alios) miners, cannot be solved by increasing the army or police. The dictatorship of the proletariat fails before the problem of exacting big crops by the coercion of the peasant or countryman. It would fail still more disastrously before the problem of obtaining food or raw materials from foreigners (without which the British could not live) in the absence of a money of stable value.
One of the most suggestive facts of the post-war situation is that European civilization almost breaks down before one of the simplest of its mechanical problems: that of ‘moving some stones from where they are not needed to the places where they are needed,’ in other words before the problem of mining and distributing coal. Millions of children have died in agony in France during this last year or two because there was no coal to transport the food, to warm the buildings. Coal is the first need of our massed populations. Its absence means collapse of everything—of transport, of the getting of food to the towns, of furnishing the machinery and fertilisers by which food can be produced in sufficient quantity. It is warmth, it is clothing, it is light, it is the daily newspaper, it is water, it is communication. All our elaboration of knowledge and science fails in the presence of this problem of ‘taking some stones from one heap and putting them on another.’ The coal famine is a microcosm of the world’s present failure.
But if all those things—and spiritual things also are involved because the absence of material well-being means widespread moral evils—depend upon coal, the getting of the coal itself is dependent upon them. We have touched upon the importance of the one element of sheer goodwill on the part of the miners as a factor in the production of coal; upon the hopelessness of making good its absence by physical coercion. But we have also seen that just as the attempted use of coercion in the international field, though ineffective to exact necessary service or exchange, can and does produce paralysis of the indispensable processes, so the ‘power’ which the position of the miner gives him is a power of paralysis only.
A later chapter shows that the instinct of industrial groups to solve their difficulties by simple coercion, the sheer assertion of power, is very closely related to the psychology of nationalism, so disruptive in the international field. Bolshevism, in the sense of belief in the effectiveness of coercion, represents the transfer of jingoism to the industrial struggle. It involves the same fallacies. A mining strike can bring the industrial machine to a full stop; to set that machine to work for the feeding of the population—which involves the co-ordination of a vast number of industries, the purchase of food and raw material from foreigners, who will only surrender it in return for promises to pay which they believe will be fulfilled—means not only technical knowledge, it means also the presence of a certain predisposition to co-operation. This Balkanised Europe which cannot feed itself has all the technical knowledge that it ever had. But its natural units are dominated by a certain temper which make impossible the co-operations by which alone the knowledge can be applied to the available natural resources.
It is also suggestive that the virtual abandonment of the gold standard is playing much the same rôle (rendering visible the inefficiency of coercion) in the struggle between the industrial that it is between the national groups. A union strikes for higher wages and is successful. The increase is granted—and is paid in paper money.