HKB
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.
There are two difficulties in such a course of action, which, though especially urgent in the case of Britain, beset every great country that chooses the same path, and not least, America. The first is the fomentation of a class war, based upon divisions of interests between capital and labor, producer and consumer, protected and unprotected industries. The initial skirmishes of such a conflict are already visible in every country where wages, prices, and profiteering are burning issues. I would most earnestly appeal to thoughtful citizens in this as in my own country to pause before heaping fuel on these fires. For the policy of national self-sufficiency or isolation means nothing less than this. Not merely does it strengthen the power of capitalistic combinations and thereby incite labor unions to direct action, blackmailing demands, and sabotage. Not merely does it let loose upon the business world all sorts of ill-considered governmental interferences for the fixation of prices or subsidies to consumers. It keeps alive and feeds the habit and the spirit of strife. For it was no accident that the great international war left as its legacy smaller international class wars in European countries. Remove from a nation the economic supports it formerly received from other nations, markets wherein to buy and sell, and you starve that nation; and starvation breeds class war and anarchy. Can any one doubt this with the terrible examples of Russia and Hungary before their eyes? But it is not a matter of war conditions alone. Carry through a policy of economic nationalism, under which all the large and well-equipped nations and empires conserve for their exclusive uses the national resources they command, and what happens? The smaller and the poorer nations, however free in the political sense, become their economic bond slaves, at the mercy of the master states for their foods and other necessaries of life. Take the case of Austria under the new conditions, with a thick population concentrated in a great political capital suddenly deprived of all free access to its former sources of supply and the markets it used to serve. For her it is a sentence of economic strangulation. Here is an extreme instance of the effect of economic isolation on a weak country. But the dangerous truth may be more broadly stated. A very few great empires and nations today control the whole available supplies of many of the foods, fabrics, and metals, the shipping and finance, that are essential to the livelihood and progress of every civilized people. Are Britain, America, France, and Japan--and especially the two greatest of these powers--going to absorb or monopolize for their exclusive purposes of trade or consumption these supplies which every country needs, or are they going to let the rest of the world have fair access to them? I think this to be upon the whole the most important of the many urgent issues that confront us. For, if close nationalism or imperialism should prevail, the weaker placed nations could not acquiesce. Close economic nationalism is not for them a possibility. They must win access to the world's supplies, peacefully if possible, or else by force.