HKB
an emergency commerce and finance, or its rejection, will depend not only America's future place in a world society but the structure of that world society in its essential character.
For in each great nation of the world the same great choice, the same great struggle of contending principles and policies, is taking place. National self-dependence or internationalism--that is everywhere the issue. It is true that in no European country can that issue be so sharply presented as in America. For economic self-sufficiency in a full sense and, therefore, political isolation, is not possible for any European state. Even a peaceful and reviving Russia must lean upon her more advanced neighbors for the economic essentials of capital and organizing skill. But the several nations can strive to reduce their interdependence and their national aid to the narrowest dimensions, and where they cannot free themselves from extraneous alliances they can restrict the area of economic dependence within a chosen circle. Britain, for example, could set her policy closely and consistently to make her world-wide empire into a self-sufficing system, and if, as is likely, she learned that even the diversified fifth of the entire globe which owns allegiance to her Crown could not satisfy all her wants, she could eke out this inadequacy with some carefully selected and purchased friendships.
This harking back to an economic nationalism is a natural reaction of the war, and is fed by a dangerous and precarious peace. Fear, greed, and suspicion prompt the victorious nations to guard their gains by reverting to a close nationalism or a ringed alliance; humiliation, without humility, the bitter pain of thwarted ambitions, resentment at their punishment, dispose the vanquished nations to keep their own company and form if possible, an economic system of their own. A prolonged war, followed by a bad peace, may leave this indelible scar upon the growing economic internationalism of the world.
The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious, and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests.
Before the war internationalism was visibly advancing with every fresh decade. The bonds of commercial and financial intercourse between the peoples of different countries were continually woven closer; the policy of self-sufficiency was continually giving way before the superior economy of specialization on a basis of natural or acquired advantages. Any reversal of this policy would be far costlier than may at present appear, even for those countries best qualified by size and resources to stand alone.
For it is not merely the direct sacrifice of the wider world economy of production and exchange, the advantage of a wider over a narrower area of free commerce, that is involved. It is the indirect perils and costs of the policy of close nationalism or restricted economic alliances that count heaviest. For economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries. This is the temptation held out to the British people today by the protectionist interests working upon the animosity of the war spirit and the sentiment of imperialism. The welding of an empire into an independent economic system, the conservation of essential or key industries and the safeguarding of our industries against "dumping," are the ostensible objectives of a policy whose chief driving motive and end is the establishment of strong industrial, commercial and financial trusts and combinations, defended by tariff walls, and endowed with the profits of monopoly.