‘Credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and we can no more shake off the domination of the one than we can of the other. We have seen that the bloodiest despot is himself the slave of money, in the sense that he is compelled to employ it. In the same way no physical force can in the modern world set at naught the force of credit. It is no more possible for a great people of the modern world to live without credit than without money, of which it is a part.... The wealth of the world is not represented by a fixed amount of gold or money now in the possession of one Power, and now in the possession of another, but depends on all the unchecked multiple activities of a community for the time being. Check that activity, whether by imposing tribute, or disadvantageous commercial conditions, or an unwelcome administration which sets up sterile political agitation, and you get less wealth—less wealth for the conqueror, as well as less for the conquered. The broadest statement of the case is that all experience—especially the experience indicated in the last chapter—shows that in trade by free consent carrying mutual benefit we get larger results for effort expended than in the exercise of physical force which attempts to exact advantage for one party at the expense of the other.’—(pp. 270-272.)
In elaboration of this general thesis it is pointed out that the processes of exchange have become too complex for direct barter, and can only take place by virtue of credit; and it is by the credit system, the ‘sensory nerve’ of the economic organism, that the self-injurious results of economic war are first shown. If, after a victorious war, we allow enemy industry and international trade to go on much as before, then obviously our victory will have had very little effect on the fundamental economic situation. If, on the other hand, we attempt for political or other reasons to destroy our enemy’s industry and trade, to keep him from the necessary materials of it, we should undermine our own credit by diminishing the exchange value of much of our own real wealth. For this reason it is ‘a great illusion’ to suppose that by the political annexation of colonies, territories with iron-mines, coal-mines, we enrich ourselves by the amount of wealth their exploitation represents.[117]
The large place which such devices as an international credit system must take in our international economy, adds enormously to the difficulty of securing any ‘spoils of victory’ in the shape of indemnity. A large indemnity is not impossible, but the only condition on which it can be made possible—a large foreign trade by the defeated people—is not one that will be readily accepted by the victorious nation. Yet the dilemma is absolute: the enemy must do a big foreign trade (or deliver in lieu of money large quantities of goods) which will compete with home production, or he can pay no big indemnity—nothing commensurate with the cost of modern war.
Since we are physically dependent on co-operation with foreigners, it is obvious that the frontiers of the national State are not co-terminous with the frontiers of our society. Human association cuts athwart frontiers. The recognition of the fact would help to break down that conception of nations as personalities which plays so large a part in international hatred. The desire to punish this or that ‘nation’ could not long survive if we had in mind, not the abstraction, but the babies, the little girls, old men, in no way responsible for the offences that excited our passions, whom we treated in our minds as a single individual.[118]
As a means of vindicating a moral, social, religious, or cultural ideal—as of freedom or democracy—war between States, and still more between Alliances, must be largely ineffective for two main reasons. First, because the State and the moral unit do not coincide. France or the British Empire could not stand as a unit for Protestanism as opposed to Catholicism, Christianity as opposed to Mohammedanism, or Individualism as opposed to Socialism, or Parliamentary Government as opposed to Bureaucratic Autocracy, or even for European ascendancy as against Coloured Races. For both Empires include large coloured elements; the British Empire is more Mohammedan than Christian, has larger areas under autocratic than under Parliamentary government; has powerful parties increasingly Socialistic. The State power in both cases is being used, not to suppress, but to give actual vitality to the non-Christian or non-European or coloured elements that it has conquered. The second great reason why it is futile to attempt to use the military power of States for ends such as freedom and democracy, is that the instincts to which it is compelled to appeal, the spirit it must cultivate and the methods it is compelled increasingly to employ, are themselves inimical to the sentiment upon which freedom must rest. Nations that have won their freedom as the result of military victory, usually employ that victory to suppress the freedom of others. To rest our freedom upon a permanent basis of nationalist military power, is equivalent to seeking security from the moral dangers of Prussianism by organising our States on the Prussian model.
Our real struggle is with nature: internecine struggles between men lessen the effectiveness of the human army. A Continent which supported precariously, with recurrent famine, a few hundred thousand savages fighting endlessly between themselves, can support, abundantly a hundred million whites who can manage to maintain peace among themselves and fight nature.
Nature here includes human nature. Just as we turn the destructive forces of external nature from our hurt to our service, not by their unintelligent defiance, but by utilising them through a knowledge of their qualities, so can the irrepressible but not ‘undirectable’ forces of instinct, emotion, sentiment, be turned by intelligence to the service of our greatest and most permanent needs.
CHAPTER IV
ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE
FOR the purposes of simplicity and brevity the main argument of The Great Illusion assumed the relative permanence of the institution of private property in Western society, and the persistence of the tendency of victorious belligerents to respect it, a tendency which had steadily grown in strength for five hundred years. The book assumed that the conqueror would do in the future what he has done to a steadily increasing degree in the past, especially as the reasons for such policy, in terms of self-interest, have so greatly grown in force during the last generation or two. To have argued its case in terms of non-existent and hypothetical conditions which might not exist for generations or centuries, would have involved hopelessly bewildering complications. And the decisive reason for not adding this complication was the fact that though it would vary the form of the argument, it would not effect the final conclusion.
As already explained in the first part of this book (Chapter II) this war has marked a revolution in the position of private property and the relation of the citizen to the State. The Treaty of Versailles departs radically from the general principles adhered to, for instance, in the Treaty of Frankfurt; the position of German traders and that of the property of German citizens does not at all to-day resemble the position in which the Treaty of Frankfurt left the French trader and French private property.