MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER

But that is not all.  The case of Russia alone has brought home to all capable of realising an economic truth the fact that the economic collapse of any large mass of population which had in the past entered into the totality of international trade is a condition of proportional impoverishment to all the others concerned.  He who sees this as to Russia cannot conceivably miss seeing it as to Germany; even tariffist hallucinations about a “losing trade” under German tariffs cannot shut out the fact that our trade with Russia and the United States was carried on under still higher hostile tariffs.  The unalterable fact remains that industrial prosperity rises and falls in the measure of the total mass of goods handled; and men who realise the responsibility of all Governments for the material wellbeing of their populations can come to only one conclusion.  Trade must be facilitated all round for our own sake.

Once more we come in sight of the truth that the industrial health of every trading country depends on the industrial health of the rest—­a Free Trade truth that is perceptibly of more vital importance now than ever before.  It is in the exchange of commodities, and the extension of consumption where that is required on a large scale, that the prosperity of the industrial nations consists.  And to say that, is to say that until the trade exchanges of the world in general return to something like the old footing, there cannot be a return of the old degree of industrial wellbeing.  Not that industrial wellbeing is to be secured by the sole means of industrial re-expansion:  the question of the need of restriction of rate of increase of population is now being more and more widely recognised as vital.  But the present argument is limited to the fiscal issue; and it must suffice merely to indicate the other as being of the highest concurrent importance.

Adhering, then, to the fiscal issue, we reach the position that, just as foreign trade has been a main source of British wealth in the past, and particularly in the Free Trade era, the wealth consumed in the war is recoverable only on the same lines.  It is not merely that British shipping—­at present so lamentably paralysed and denuded of earning power—­cannot be restored to prosperity without a large resumption of international exchanges:  a large proportion of industrial employment unalterably depends upon that resumption.  And it is wholly impossible to return to pre-war levels of employment by any plan of penalising imports.

THE DYESTUFFS ACT