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for alms to a negro savage, who repulsed me with disgust. What is the meaning of this?
The meaning is that, as very frequently happens in the history of ideas, our terminology is a survival of conditions no longer existing, and our mental conceptions[Pg 51] follow at the tail of our vocabulary. International politics are still dominated by terms applicable to conditions which the processes of modern life have altogether abolished.
In the Roman times--indeed, in all the ancient world--it may have been true that the conquest of a territory meant a tangible advantage to the conqueror; it meant the exploitation of the conquered territory by the conquering State itself, to the advantage of that State and its citizens. It not infrequently meant the enslavement of the conquered people and the acquisition of wealth in the form
of slaves as a direct result of the conquering war. In mediaeval times a war of conquest meant at least immediate tangible booty in the shape of movable property, actual gold and silver, land parcelled out among the chiefs of the conquering nation, as it was at the Norman Conquest, and so forth.
At a later period conquest at least involved an advantage to the reigning house of the conquering nation, and it was mainly the squabbles of rival sovereigns for prestige and power which produced the wars of many centuries.
At a still later period, civilization, as a whole--not necessarily the conquering nation--gained (sometimes) by the conquest of sav-age peoples, in that order was substituted for disorder. In the period of the colonization of newly-discovered land, the preemption of territory by one particular nation secured an advantage for the citizens of that nation, in that its overflowing population found homes in conditions[Pg 52] preferable socially, or politically, to the conditions imposed by alien nations. But none of these considerations applies to the problem with which we are dealing. We are concerned with the case of fully civilized rival nations in fully oc-
cupied territory or with civilizations so firmly set that conquest could not sensibly modify their character, and the fact of conquering such territory gives to the conqueror no material advantage which he could not have had without conquest. And in these conditions--the realities of the political world as we find it to-day--"domination," or "predominance of armament," or the "command
of the sea," can do nothing for commerce and industry or general well-being: England may build fifty Dreadnoughts and not sell so much as a penknife the more in consequence. She might conquer Germany to-morrow, and she would find that she could not make a single Englishman a shilling's worth the richer in consequence, the war indemnity notwithstanding.
How have conditions so changed that terms which were applicable to the ancient world--in one sense at least to the mediaeval world,
and in another sense still to the world of that political renaissance which gave to Great Britain its Empire--are no longer applicable in any sense to the conditions of the world as we find them to-day? How has it become impossible for one nation to take by conquest the wealth of another for the benefit of the people of the conqueror? How is it that we are confronted by the absurdity (which the facts of the British Empire go to prove) of the conquering[Pg 53] people being able to exact from conquered territory rather less than more advantage than it was able to do before the conquest took place?
I am not at this stage going to pass in review all the factors that have contributed to this change, because it will suffice for the demonstration upon which I am now engaged to call attention to a phenomenon which is the outcome of all those factors and which is undeniable, and that is, the financial interdependence of the modern world. But I will forecast here what belongs more properly to
a later stage of this work, and will give just a hint of the forces which are the result mainly of one great fact--the division of labor
intensified by facility of communication.
When the division of labor was so little developed that every homestead produced all that it needed, it mattered nothing if part of the community was cut off from the world for weeks and months at a time. All the neighbors of a village or homestead might be slain or harassed, and no inconvenience resulted. But if to-day an English county is by a general railroad strike cut off for so much as forty-eight hours from the rest of the economic organism, we know that whole sections of its population are threatened with fam-ine. If in the time of the Danes, England could by some magic have killed all foreigners, she would presumably have been the better off. If she could do the same thing to-day, half her population would starve to death. If on one side of the frontier a community is, say, wheat-producing, and on the[Pg 54] other coal-producing, each is dependent for its very existence, on the fact of the other being able to carry on its labor. The miner cannot in a week set to and grow a crop of wheat; the farmer must wait for his wheat to grow, and must meantime feed his family and dependents. The exchange involved here must go on, and each party have fair expectation
that he will in due course be able to reap the fruits of his labor, or both must starve; and that exchange, that expectation, is merely the expression in its simplest form of commerce and credit; and the interdependence here indicated has, by the countless developments of rapid communication, reached such a condition of complexity that the interference with any given operation affects not merely the parties directly involved, but numberless others having at first sight no connection therewith.
The vital interdependence here indicated, cutting athwart frontiers, is largely the work of the last forty years; and it has, during that
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time, so developed as to have set up a financial interdependence of the capitals of the world, so complex that disturbance in New York involves financial and commercial disturbance in London, and, if sufficiently grave, compels financiers of London to co-op- erate with those of New York to put an end to the crisis, not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of commercial self-protection. The complexity of modern finance makes New York dependent on London, London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin, to a greater degree than has ever yet been the case in history. This interdependence[Pg 55] is the result of the daily use of those contrivances of civilization which date from yesterday--the rapid post, the instantaneous dissemination of financial and commercial information
by means of telegraphy, and generally the incredible increase in the rapidity of communication which has put the half-dozen chief capitals of Christendom in closer contact financially, and has rendered them more dependent the one upon the other than were the chief cities of Great Britain less than a hundred years ago.
A well-known French authority, writing recently in a financial publication, makes this reflection:
The very rapid development of industry has given rise to the active intervention therein of finance, which has become its nervus rerum, and has come to play a dominating role. Under the influence of finance, industry is beginning to lose its exclusively national character to take on a character more and more international. The animosity of rival nationalities seems to be in process of attenuation as the result of this increasing international solidarity. This solidarity was manifested in a striking fashion in the last industrial and monetary crisis. This crisis, which appeared in its most serious form in the United States and Germany, far from being any profit to rival nations, has been injurious to them. The nations competing with America and Germany, such as England and France, have suffered only less than the countries directly affected. It must not be forgotten that, quite apart from the financial interests involved, directly or indirectly, in the industry of other countries, every producing[Pg 56] country is at one and the same time, as well as being
a competitor and a rival, a client and a market. Financial and commercial solidarity is increasing every day at the expense of commercial and industrial competition. This was certainly one of the principal causes which a year or two ago prevented the outbreak of war between Germany and France a propos of Morocco, and which led to the understanding of Algeciras. There can be no doubt, for those who have studied the question, that the influence of this international economic solidarity is increasing despite ourselves. It has not resulted from conscious action on the part of any of us, and it certainly cannot be arrested by any conscious action on our part.[11]
A fiery patriot sent to a London paper the following letter: