Modern questions bring men into touch with one another. "Can you repair a locomotive?" "Do you understand coal mining?" "Can you carry us safely to Japan?" "Will you take shoes in exchange for petroleum?" "Are you able to get along with people?" "Have you any surplus wheat?" "How do you suppose we can get rid of the boll-weevil?" "Let us show you a new style tractor." If a man can repair an engine, he is wanted in an engine shop. If he can dig coal, he is needed in a coal mine. If he has shoes to exchange for fuel, he finds a ready customer. If he can get along with an odd assortment of his fellows, he is in demand everywhere. The new world is a co-operative world in which people are working together, living together, thinking together; and a test of man's capacity to take part in its activities lies in his ability to be an effective, co-operating member of a world group.
[1] Before the war Great Britain imported about half of her food. By 1920 she was importing about three-quarters of it. On the basis of the 1919-1920 harvests, British wheat sufficed for less than a third of the British population. See "The Fruits of Victory," Norman Angell, Glasgow. Collins, 1921, p. 9.
4. The Basis of a World Program
With economic life established on a world scale, it is inevitable that the range of men's thoughts and the lines of their social groupings should assume the same general scope. The late war made it quite apparent that war means world war, and that a real peace is impossible unless it is a world peace. The post-war experience has shown with equal clearness, that prosperity means world prosperity, and that it is impossible to destroy the economic well-being of an integral part of the world without destroying the well-being of the whole world. These things were suspected before the war, when they formed the themes of moral dissertations and scholarly essays, of syndicalist pamphlets, socialist programs and revolutionary appeals. But it required the hard knocks of the past eight years to lift them so far out of the realm of theory into that of reality, that any thinking human being who faces the facts must admit their truth.[2]
The economics of the modern world make it inevitable that thinkers on public questions, particularly on economic questions, should frame their thoughts in world terms, and that the practical plans for the organization and direction of human affairs should be built around an idea which includes these three elements:
1. Any workable plan for the organization of the world must have an economic foundation.
2. Such a plan must include all of the economically essential portions of the world. It will be ineffective if it is confined to any one nation, to any one group of nations, or to any one continent.
3. Such a plan must rely, for its fulfillment, on world thinking and world organization.
These propositions do not imply that economic forces and world organization must become the centers of exclusive attention. There are potent forces, other than economic ones, and there are forms of local organization that must be developed or perpetuated as a matter of course. But for the moment the economic forces and the world phases of organization have assumed a position of primary importance.
[2] The Manchester Guardian Commercial, Supplement for April 20, 1922, page IV, carries an advertisement signed by Sir Charles W. Macara, Chairman and Managing Director of Henry Bannerman and Sons, Ltd., Chairman of the Manchester Cotton Employers Association, etc., which contains a very forceful presentation of this point. "It is impossible for any country to expect to win economic success at the expense or in total indifference to the success of others.... The good of one country is bound up with the good of another, and it is only by studying what will be mutually advantageous that we shall find the key to our good fortune.... The whole world is interdependent, and you cannot injure one member of the international body without injuring all the rest."