HKB
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.
The fatality of the great choice is thus evident. Nations must and will fight for the means of life. Close economic nationalism or imperialism on the part of the great empires must, therefore, compel the restricted countries to organize force for their economic liberation. This in turn will compel the great empires to maintain strong military and naval defences. It is impossible for the other nations of the earth to leave the essential supplies of metals, foods, and oils, and the control of transport in the exclusive possession of one or a few close national corporations or a permanent "Big Four." Under such conditions the sacrifices of the great war would have been made in vain. Nothing would have been done to end war, or to rescue the world from the burden of militarism. The pre-war policy of contending alliances and of competing armaments, draining more deeply than ever the surplus incomes of each people, would be resumed. And it would bring no sense of security, but only the postponement of further inevitable conflicts in which the very roots of western civilization might perish.
The renewed and intolerable burdens of such a militarism, with its accompaniments of autocracy, must let loose class war in every nation which has gone through the agony of the European struggle and has seen the great hope of a peaceful internationalism blighted.
It is predominantly upon America and Britain that this great moral economic choice rests, the choice on which the safety and the progress of humanity depend. A refusal by either of these great powers can make any league of nations and any economic internationalism impossible. The confident consent of both can furnish the material and moral support for the new order. If these countries in close concerted action were prepared to place at the service of the new world order their exclusive or superior resources of foods, materials, transport and finance--the economic pillars of civilization--the stronger pooling their resources with the weaker for the rescue work in this dire emergency, this political cooeperation would supply that mutual confidence and goodwill without which no governmental machinery of a League of Nations, however skilfully contrived, can begin to work.
I have spoken of Britain and America as the two countries upon whose choice this supreme issue hangs. But the act of choice is not the same for the two. The British imperial policy (apart from that of the self-governing dominions) has been conducted on a basis of free trade or economic internationalism. A reversion to close imperialism would be for her a retrogression. The United States, on the other hand, has practised a distinctively national economy, and the adoption of a free internationalism would be a great act of faith, or--as some would put it--a leap in the dark.