Today, although Britain supports anything from twenty to forty times, and North America something like a thousand times, as large a population in much greater comfort, with no period of famine, with the whole population living much more largely and deriving much more from the soil than did the men of the Heptarchy, or the Red Indians, the "struggle for bread" does not now take the form of struggle between groups of the population. The more they fought, the less efficiently did they support themselves; the less they fought one another, the more efficiently did they all support themselves.
This simple illustration is at least proof of this, that the struggle for material things did not involve any necessary struggle between the separate groups or States; for those material things are given in infinitely greater abundance when the States cease to struggle. Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those conflicts, that origin was not any inevitable conflict in the exploitation of the earth. If those conflicts were concerned with material things at all, they arose from a mistake about the best means of obtaining them, exploiting the earth, and ceased when those concerned realized the mistake.
Just as Britain supported its population better when Englishmen gave up fighting between themselves, so the world as a whole could support its population better if it gave up fighting.
Moreover, we have passed out of the stage when we could massacre a conquered population to make room for us. When we conquer an inferior people like the Filipinos, we don't exterminate them, we give them an added chance of life. The weakest don't go to the wall.
But at this point parenthetically I want to enter a warning. You may say, if this notion of the rivalry of nations is false, how do you account for the fact of its playing so large a part in the present war?
Well, that is easily explained—men are not guided necessarily by their interest even in their soberest moments, but by what they believe to be their interest. Men do not judge from the facts, but from what they believe to be the facts. War is the "failure of human understanding." The religious wars were due to the belief that two religions could not exist side by side. It was not true, but the false belief provoked the wars. Our notions as to the relation of political power to a nation's prosperity are just as false, and this fallacy, like the older one, plays its part in the causation of war.
Now, let us for a moment apply the very general rule thus revealed to the particular case of the United States at this present juncture.
American merchants may in certain cases, if they are shrewd and able, do a very considerably increased trade, though it is just as certain that other merchants will be losing trade, and I think there is pretty general agreement that as a matter of simple fact the losses of the war so far have for America very considerably and very obviously overbalanced the gains. The loss has been felt so tangibly by the United States Government, for instance, that a special loan had to be voted in order to stop some of the gaps. Whole States, whose interests are bound up with staples like cotton, were for a considerable time threatened with something resembling commercial paralysis.
While we may admit advances and gains in certain isolated directions, the extra burden is felt in all directions of commerce and industry. And that extra burden is visible through finance—the increased cost of money, the scarcity of capital, the lower negotiability of securities, the greater uncertainty concerning the future. It is by means of the financial reaction that America, as a whole, has felt the adverse effects of this war. There is not a considerable village, much less a considerable city, not a merchant, not a captain of industry in the United States that has not so felt it. It is plainly evident that by the progressive dearness of money, the lower standard of living that will result in Europe, the effect on immigration, and other processes which I will touch upon at greater length later, any temporary stimulus which a trade here and there may receive will be more than offset by the difficulties due to financial as apart from industrial or commercial reactions.
This war will come near to depriving America for a decade or two of its normal share of the accumulated capital of the older peoples, whether that capital be used in paying war indemnities or in paying off the cost of the war or in repairing its ravages. In all cases it will make capital much dearer, and many enterprises which with more abundant capital might have been born and might have stimulated American industry will not be born. For the best part of a generation perhaps the available capital of Europe will be used to repair the ravages of war there, to pay off the debts created by war, and to start life normally once more. We shall suffer in two ways.