What more do we need than fair competition to constitute the
coöperative international life which we dreamed yesterday and now must
consider, not merely as a dream, but as the only alternative to a
future of horror?
Free trade has been not unnaturally urged as at least one condition.
Tariffs certainly isolate. To say to a country: "You shall manufacture
nothing unless you own the raw material; you shall sell nothing unless
at prices which I fix," is likely to provoke the reply: "Then I must
acquire lands in which raw materials are found; I must acquire colonies
which will buy my products." Trade agreements mean coöperation for
those within, unless they are one-sided and made under duress; in any
case they are exclusive of those without. Free trade, the open door,
seems to offer a better way. But free trade in name is not free trade
unless the parties are really free--free from ignorance, from pressure
of want. If one party is weak and the other unscrupulous; if one
competitor has a lower standard of living than the other, freedom of
trade will not mean genuine coöperation. Such coöperation as means good
for all requires either an equality of conditions between traders and
laborers of competing nations and of nations which exchange goods, or
else an international control to prevent unfair competition,
exploitation of weaker peoples, and lowering of standards of living.
Medical science is giving an object lesson which may well have a wide
application. It is seeking to combat disease in its centers of
diffusion. Instead of attempting to quarantine against the Orient, it
is aiding the Orient to overcome those conditions which do harm alike
to Orient and Occident. Plague, anthrax, yellow fever, cannot exist in
one country without harm to all. Nor in the long run can men reach true
coöperation so long as China and Africa are a prize for the exploiter
rather than equals in the market. Not merely in the political sense,
but in its larger meanings democracy here is not safe without democracy
there. Education, and the lifting of all to a higher level, is the
ultimate goal. And until education, invention, and intercommunication
have done their work of elevation, international control must protect
and regulate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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