Tariffs.—­A Free Trade Union should be established under the auspices of the League of Nations of countries undertaking to impose no protectionist tariffs[160] whatever against the produce of other members of the Union, Germany, Poland, the new States which formerly composed the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, and the Mandated States should be compelled to adhere to this Union for ten years, after which time adherence would be voluntary.  The adherence of other States would be voluntary from the outset.  But it is to be hoped that the United Kingdom, at any rate, would become an original member.

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By fixing the Reparation payments well within Germany’s capacity to pay, we make possible the renewal of hope and enterprise within her territory, we avoid the perpetual friction and opportunity of improper pressure arising out of Treaty clauses which are impossible of fulfilment, and we render unnecessary the intolerable powers of the Reparation Commission.

By a moderation of the clauses relating directly or indirectly to coal, and by the exchange of iron-ore, we permit the continuance of Germany’s industrial life, and put limits on the loss of productivity which would be brought about otherwise by the interference of political frontiers with the natural localization of the iron and steel industry.

By the proposed Free Trade Union some part of the loss of organization and economic efficiency may be retrieved, which must otherwise result from the innumerable new political frontiers now created between greedy, jealous, immature, and economically incomplete nationalist States.  Economic frontiers were tolerable so long as an immense territory was included in a few great Empires; but they will not be tolerable when the Empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey have been partitioned between some twenty independent authorities.  A Free Trade Union, comprising the whole of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe, Siberia, Turkey, and (I should hope) the United Kingdom, Egypt, and India, might do as much for the peace and prosperity of the world as the League of Nations itself.  Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, and Switzerland might be expected to adhere to it shortly.  And it would be greatly to be desired by their friends that France and Italy also should see their way to adhesion.

It would be objected, I suppose, by some critics that such an arrangement might go some way in effect towards realizing the former German dream of Mittel-Europa.  If other countries were so foolish as to remain outside the Union and to leave to Germany all its advantages, there might be some truth in this.  But an economic system, to which every one had the opportunity of belonging and which gave special privilege to none, is surely absolutely free from the objections of a privileged and avowedly imperialistic scheme of exclusion and discrimination.  Our attitude to these criticisms