How

We need to beware of patchwork. The view of the Labour Party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that Government Department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself. The individual worker, or for that matter the individual statesman, immersed in daily routine-like the individual soldier in a battle-easily fails to understand the magnitude and far-reaching importance of what is taking place around him. How does it fit together as a whole? does it look from a distance? Count Okuma, one of the oldest, most experienced and ablest of the statesmen of Japan, watching the present conflict from the other side of the globe, declares it to be nothing less than the death of European civilisation. Just as in the past the civilisations of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage and the great Roman Empire have been successively destroyed, so, in the judgment of this detached observer, the civilisation of all Europe is even now receiving its death-blow. We of the Labour Party can so far agree in this estimate as to recognise, in the present world catastrophe, if not the death, in Europe, of civilisation itself, at any rate the culmination and collapse of a distinctive industrial civilisation, which the workers will not seek to reconstruct. At such times of crisis it is easier to slip into ruin than to progress into higher forms of organisation.

Programme of the British Labour Party on Reconstruction.

CHAPTER I

RELATION OF COMMERCIAL POLICY TO RECONSTRUCTION

Concepts

Facing the problems of reconstruction Their nature and variety - Commercial policy as a reconstruction problem of international commerce before the war The permanent value of nationalism Danger from the spirit of Prussianism - Bolshevism—The optimistic fatalist Democracy and a constructive programme necessary- - America's part in the world settlement - A new social point of view — Three stages of the industrial revolution The partnership between government and industry.

Prussian military power has been in its outward symbols discredited and destroyed. The greatest of world conflicts, so replete with tragic happenings for men and nations, has ended in a complete victory for the western democracies. But we should harbor no delusive hope of having secured something of permanent value through military victory alone. By military success we have not solved the perplexing problems before the American Nation and the worldwe have merely reached them. War is a negative thing; it has simply removed an obstruction. Victory has brought responsibility. Our task now is the rebuilding of our social, economic, and political life. We are face to face with the work of reconstruction.

The war has solved some problems, clarified others, and created still others. We live in a different world from that of 1914. It is different both in fact and in thought. While we were absorbed in the conflict of arms, important changes were wrought in the social, economic, and political structure of the world, and almost unconsciously we began to realize the inadequacy

of ideas and institutions which before were regarded, except by a small minority, as not subject to criticism.

The problems of reconstruction are as diverse and intricate as the life of mankind. No aspect of our social, economic, and political life has escaped the modifying influences of forces released by the war. Nevertheless, almost all of these problems existed in a more or less acute form before the war. Our interest in them has been deepened because in some cases they were contributing causes of the war and in other cases the progress of the war has made it impossible longer to ignore them with impunity. In America, and in other nations too, interest has been stimulated in a range of widely differing problems. They include labor and its right to a better and more responsible place in industry, its distribution in both agricultural and manufacturing pursuits, the employment of women and children, and the proper absorption into peaceful pursuits of the demobilized soldiers, sailors, and civilian war workers. Agricultural questions, of supreme importance, relate to the price and distribution of food, the development of the public domain, loans to farmers, and agricultural coöperation and land tenure. The conservation, development, and distribution of our great natural resources lumber, coal, oil, metals, and others have a renewed importance as a result of our war-time experience. Taxation and other phases of public finance, the efficiency and purpose of our military establishment, religion and education, communication and transportation, corporate organizations these and other questions must be reconsidered in the light of recent happenings. Even our social, economic, and political institutions are being put on the defensive. Since the Russian revolu

tion we do not take so much for granted. As important as any of the problems of reconstruction are those of commercial policy. We are thinking, more now than before the war, of the wider aspects of competition between nations- the tariff, foreign trade, and the activities of our commercial interests abroad.

The international problems of reconstruction are more baffling than the domestic problems. Territorial, dynastic, national, racial, and social questions which existed before the war and were contributing causes of the conflict are to be passed on for solution during the reconstruction period. Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, and Armenians deservedly seek independent national existence. Dynastic houses, divested of their autocratic power, plot and hope for a reaction that will serve their selfish ends. Racial antipathies seem at times to present problems which defy solution. Revolution in some countries threatens to destroy the last securities of man's common life. Land-owning, trading, and investing classes, propagating their own interests in the guise of patriotism, becloud the issues of a democratic peace. Reconstruction in world affairs is in fact a complex task involving military control, territorial realignments, the adjustment of racial rivalries often embittered by oppression and turned into unnatural channels by propaganda, colonial claims and policies, the protection and education of the economically backward peoples of the world, the regulation and restraint, where desirable, of trading and financial interests, and the devising of an international organization that will tend at least toward the prevention of a recurrence of world wars.

Reconstruction should mean much more than a mere rearrangement of the world that existed prior to 1914. It should bring revolutionary changes, but by orderly

(parliamentary) means. Let us consider carefully what it is we are setting out to rebuild, what it is we are to construct on the foundations of the past. The democratization of our national and world life will in many places run counter to exclusive class and national interests which can no longer plead a law or a tradition as alone a sufficient justification for their maintenance. Ideas of "natural right," "vested interests," "personal liberty," and "national sovereignty" should no longer bar interference with conditions that the war has demonstrated to be intolerable because in many cases they made the war possible. No lasting peace can be brought about if we fail to reexamine the fundamental relations of men and nations and to act upon the knowledge thus obtained.

It is the function of this book to examine those aspects of the work of reconstruction that have to do with commercial policy. The conquest of nature and the methods adopted by man to supply his material wants, closely correlated as they are with the progress of man's moral and spiritual life, make interesting and important chapters in the annals of the human race. Production and trade have always been vital, and as society has grown more complex and as government has concerned itself more with the interests of the people and less with the aspirations of reigning dynastics, they have increasingly absorbed the attention not only of business men but of statesmen. The importance of the economic factor in reconstruction must be evident to the most casual observer of the myriad activities of men in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, shipping, trading, and finance. These activities have not always resulted in harmony; they have led at times to antagonisms, rival