Let us compare France’s position. Unlike the German, the French population has hardly increased at all in recent generations. In the years immediately preceding the War, indeed, it showed a definite decline, a tendency naturally more marked since the War. This low birth-rate has greatly concerned French statesmen, and remedies have been endlessly discussed, with no result. The causes are evidently very deep-rooted indeed. The soil which has been inherited by this declining population is among the richest and most varied in the world, producing in the form of wines, brandies, and certain other luxuries, results which can be duplicated nowhere else. It stretches almost into the sub-tropics. In addition, the nation possesses a vast colonial empire—in Algeria, Tunis, Morocco (which include some of the greatest food-growing areas in the world), Madagascar, Equatorial Africa, Cochin-China; an empire managed, by the way, on strongly protectionist principles.
We have thus on the one side a people of forty millions with no tendency to increase, mainly not industrial (because not needing to be), possessing undeveloped areas capable, in their food and mineral resources (home and colonial), of supporting a population very many times its size. On the other hand is a neighbouring group, very much larger, and rapidly increasing, occupying a poorer and smaller territory. It is unable to subsist at modern standards on that territory without a highly-developed industry. The essential raw materials have passed into the hands of the smaller group. The latter on grounds of self-defence, fearing to be outnumbered, may withhold those materials from the larger group; and its right so to do is to be unquestioned.
Does any one really believe that Western Society could remain stable, resting on moral foundations of this kind? Can one disregard primary economic need in considering the problem of preserving the Europe of ‘free and independent national states’ of Mr. Asquith’s phrase?[29]
If things are left where this Treaty leaves them, then the militarist theories which before were fallacies will have become true. We can no longer say that peoples as distinct from imperialist parties have no interest in conquest. In this new world of to-morrow—this ‘better and more stable world’—the interests of peoples themselves will be in deadly conflict. For an expanding people it will be a choice between robbery of neighbours’ territory and starvation. Re-conquest of Lorraine will become for the Germans not a matter of hurt pride or sentiment, but a matter of actual food need, a need which will not, like hurt pride, diminish with the lapse of time, but increase with the growth of the population. On the side of war, then, truly we shall find ‘the human stomach and the human womb.’
The change is a deeper reversion than we seem to realise. Even under feudalism the means of subsistence of the people, the land they cultivated, remained as before. Only the lords were changed—and one lord was very like another. But where, under modern industrial economy, titles to property in indispensable raw materials can be cancelled by a conqueror and become the State property of the conquering nation, which enforces the right to distribute them as it pleases, whole populations may find themselves deprived of the actual means of supporting themselves on the territory that they occupy.
We shall have set up a disruptive ferment working with all the force of the economic needs of 50 or 100 million virile folk to bring about once more some vast explosion. Europe will once more be living on a volcano, knowing no remedy save futile efforts to ‘sit on the lid.’
The beginnings of the attempt are already visible. Colonel Repington points out that owing to the break up of Russia and Austria, and the substitution for these two powerful States of a large number of small, independent ones likely to quarrel among themselves, Germany will be the largest and most cohesive of all the European Continental nations, relatively stronger than she was before the War. He demands in consequence, that not only France, but Holland and Belgium, be extended to the Rhine, which must become the strategic frontier of civilisation against barbarism. He says there can be no sort of security otherwise. He even reminds us that it was Rome’s plan. (He does not remind us that if it had notably succeeded then we should hardly be trying it again two thousand years later.) The plan gives us, in fact, this prospect: the largest and most unified racial block in Europe will find itself surrounded by a number of lesser States, containing German minorities, and possessing materials indispensable to Germany’s economic life, to which she is refused peaceful access in order that she may not become strong enough to obtain access by force; an attempt which she will be compelled to make because peaceful access is denied to her. Our measures create resistance; that resistance calls forth more extreme measures; those measures further resistance, and so on. We are in the thick once more of Balance of Power, strategic frontiers, every element of the old stultifying statecraft against which all the Allies—before the Armistice—made flaming protest.
And when this conflict of rights—each fighting as he believes for the right to life—has blazed up into passions that transcend all thought of gain or advantage, we shall be asked somewhat contemptuously what purpose it serves to discuss so cold a thing as ‘economics’ in the midst of this welter.
It won’t serve any purpose. But the discussion of economics before it had become a matter for passion might have prevented the conflict.
The situation has this complication—and irony: Increasing prosperity, a higher standard of living, sets up a tendency prudentially to check increase of population. France, and in hardly less degree even new and sparsely populated countries like Australia, have for long shown a tendency to a decline of the rate of increase. In France, indeed, as has already been mentioned, an absolute decrease had set in before the War. But as soon as this tendency becomes apparent, the same nationalist who invokes the menace of over-population as the justification for war, also invokes nationalism to reverse the tendency which would solve the over-population problem. This is part of the mystic nature of the nationalist impulse. Colonel Roosevelt is not the only warlike nationalist who has exhausted the resources of invective to condemn ‘race suicide’ and to enjoin the patriotic duty of large families.