But if today by some sort of magic Britain could kill off all foreigners the means of livelihood for quite an appreciable portion of her population would have disappeared. Millions would be threatened by actual starvation. For Britain's overseas trade, on which so large a proportion of the population actually lives, is mainly with the outside world and not with her own empire. We have seen what isolation merely from two countries has meant for Great Britain. Britain is still maintaining her contacts with the world as a whole, but the cessation of relationship with two countries has precipitated the gravest financial crisis known in all her history, has kept her Stock Exchanges closed for months, has sent her Consols to a lower point than any known since the worst period of the Napoleonic wars, and has compelled the Government ruthlessly to pledge its credit for the support of banking institutions and all the various trades that have been most seriously hit.
Nor is Germany's isolation altogether complete. She manages through neutral countries and otherwise to maintain a considerable current of relationship with the outside world, but how deeply and disastrously the partial severance of contact has affected Germany we shall not at present, probably at no time, in full measure know.
All this gives a mere hint of what the organized isolation by the entire world would mean to any one nation. Imagine the position of a civilized country whose ports no ship from another country would enter, whose bills no banker would discount, a country unable to receive a telegram or a letter from the outside world or send one thereto, whose citizens could neither travel in other countries or maintain communications therewith. It would have an effect in the modern world somewhat equivalent to that of the dreadful edicts of excommunication and interdict which the papal power was able to issue in the mediaeval world.
I am aware, of course, that such a measure would fall very hardly upon certain individuals in the countries inflicting this punishment, but it is quite within the power of the Governments of those countries to do what the British Government has done in the case of persons like acceptors of German bills who found themselves threatened with bankruptcy and who threatened in consequence to create great disturbance around them because of the impossibility of securing payment from the German indorsers. The British Government came to the rescue of those acceptors, used the whole national credit to sustain them. It is expensive, if you will, but infinitely less expensive than a war, and, finally, most of the cost of it will probably be recovered.
Now if that were done, how could a country so dealt with retaliate? She could not attack all the world at once. Upon those neighbors more immediately interested could be thrown the burden of taking such defensive military measures as the circumstances might dictate. You might have a group of powers probably taking such defensive measures and all the powers of Christendom co-operating economically by this suggested non-intercourse. It is possible even that the powers as a whole might contribute to a general fund indemnifying individuals in those States particularly hit by the fact of non-intercourse. I am thinking, for instance, of shipping interests in a port like Amsterdam if the decree of non-intercourse were proclaimed against a power like Germany.
We have little conception of the terror which such a policy might constitute to a nation. It has never been tried, of course, because even in war complete non-intercourse is not achieved. At the present time Germany is buying and selling and trading with the outside world, cables from Berlin are being sent almost as freely to New York as cables from London and German merchants are making contracts, maintaining connections of very considerable complexity. But if this machinery of non-intercourse were organized as it might be, there would be virtually no neutrals, and its effect in our world today would be positively terrifying.
It is true that the American administration did try something resembling a policy of non-intercourse in dealing with Mexico. But, the thing was a fiction. While the Department of State talked of non-intercourse the Department of the Treasury was busy clearing ships for Mexico, facilitating the dispatch of mails, &c. And, of course, Mexico's communication with Europe remained unimpaired; at the exact moment when the President of the United States was threatening Huerta with all sorts of dire penalties Huerta's Government was arranging in London for the issue of large loans and the advertisements of these Mexican loans were appearing in The London Times. So that the one thing that might have moved Huerta's Government the United States Government was unable to enforce. In order to enforce it, it needed the co-operation of other countries.
I have spoken of the economic world State—of all those complex international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking, codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized, incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place. The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne, and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in the smoking room of some Brussels hotel. The world State has not so much as an office or an address, The United States should give it one. Out of its vast resources it should endow civilization with a Central Bureau of Organization—a Clearing House of its international activities as it were, with the funds needed for its staff and upkeep.
If undertaken with largeness of spirit, it would become the capital of the world. And the Old World looks to America to do this service, because it is the one which it cannot do for itself. Its old historic jealousies and squabbles, from which America is so happily detached, prevent any one power taking up and putting through this work of organization, but America could do it, and do it so effectively that from it might well flow this organization of that common action of all the nations against any recalcitrant member of which I have spoken as a means of enforcing non-militarily a common decision.
It is this world State which it should be the business of America during the next decade or two to co-ordinate, to organize. Its organization will not come into being as the result of a week-end talk between Ambassadors. There will be difficulties, material as well as moral, jealousies to overcome, suspicions to surmount. But this war places America in a more favorable position than any one European power. The older powers would be less suspicious of her than of any one among their number. America has infinitely greater material resources, she has a greater gift for improvised organization, she is less hidebound by old traditions, more disposed to make an attempt along new lines.