H.M. PETER I—King of Servia
WALTER H. PAGE—American Ambassador to Great Britain
—(Photo from Paul Thompson)
But this community of German workmen, called into existence by the Argentina trade, maintains by its consumption of coffee a plantation in Brazil, which buys its machinery in Chicago. The destruction, therefore, of the Essen trade, while it might have given business to the American locomotive maker, would have taken it from, say, an American agricultural implement maker. The economic interests involved sort themselves, irrespective of the national groupings. I have summarized the whole process as follows, and the need for getting some of these simple things straight is my excuse for quoting myself:
Co-operation between nations has become essential for the very life of their peoples. But that co-operation does not take place as between States at all. A trading corporation, "Britain" does not buy cotton from another corporation, "America." A manufacturer in Manchester strikes a bargain with a merchant in Louisiana in order to keep a bargain with a dyer in Germany, and three or a much larger number of parties enter into virtual, or, perhaps, actual, contract, and form a mutually dependent economic community, (numbering, it may be, with the work people in the group of industries involved, some millions of individuals)—an economic entity, so far as one can exist, which does not include all organized society.
The special interests of such a community may become hostile to those of another community, but it will almost certainly not be a "national" one, but one of a like nature, say a shipping ring or groups of international bankers or Stock Exchange speculators. The frontiers of such communities do not coincide with the areas in which operate the functions of the State.
How could a State, say Britain, act on behalf of an economic entity such as that just indicated? By pressure against America or Germany? But the community against which the British manufacturer in this case wants pressure exercised is not "America" or "Germany"—both Americans and Germans are his partners in the matter. He wants it exercised against the shipping ring or the speculators or the bankers who are in part British....
This establishes two things, therefore: The fact that the political and economic units do not coincide, and the fact which follows as a consequence—that action by political authorities designed to control economic activities which take no account of the limits of political jurisdiction is necessarily irrelevant and ineffective.—(From "Arms and Industry: A Study of the Foundations of International Polity." Page 28. Putnams: New York.)
The fallacy of the idea that the groups we call nations must be in conflict because they struggle together for bread and the means of sustenance is demonstrated immediately when we recall the simple facts of historical development. When, in the British Islands, the men of Wessex were fighting with the men of Sussex, far more frequently and bitterly than today the men of Germany fight with those of France, or either with those of Russia, the separate States which formed the island were struggling with one another for sustenance, just as the tribes which inhabited the North American Continent at the time of our arrival there were struggling with one another for the game and hunting grounds. It was in both cases ultimately a "struggle for bread."
At that time, when Britain was composed of several separate States, that struggled thus with one another for land and food, it supported with great difficulty anything between one and two million inhabitants, just as the vast spaces now occupied by the United States supported about a hundred thousand, often subject to famine, frequently suffering great shortage of food, able to secure just the barest existence of the simplest kind.