The Fruits of Victory: A Sequel to The Great IllusionAngell, Norman
History
The Fruits of Victory: A Sequel to The Great Illusion
Angell, Norman
Economic history -- 1918-1945; World War, 1914-1918 -- Influence
But if this interdependence of factory and farm in the production of
food is indisputable, though generally ignored, it involves a further
fact just as indisputable, and even more completely ignored. And the
further fact is that the manufacturing and the farming, neither of which
can go on without the other, may well be situated in different States.
Vienna starves largely because the coal needed for its factories is now
situated in a foreign State--Czecho-Slovakia--which, partly from
political motives perhaps, fails to deliver it. Great food producing
areas in the Balkans and Russia are dependent for their tools and
machinery, for the stability of the money without which the food will
not be produced, upon the industries of Germany. Those industries are
destroyed, the markets have disappeared, and with them the incentive to
production. The railroads of what ought to be food producing States are
disorganized from lack of rolling stock, due to the same paralysis of
German industry; and so the food production is diminished. Tens of
millions of acres outside Germany, whose food the world sorely needs,
have been rendered barren by the industrial paralysis of the Central
Empires which the economic terms of the Treaty render inevitable.
Speaking of the need of Russian agriculture for German industry, Mr.
Maynard Keynes, who has worked out the statistics revealing the relative
position of Germany to the rest of Europe, writes:--
'It is impossible geographically and for many other reasons for
Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans to undertake it--we have neither the
incentive nor the means for doing the work on a sufficient scale.
Germany, on the other hand, has the experience, the incentive, and to a
large extent, the materials for furnishing the Russian peasant with the
goods of which he has been starved for the past five years, for
reorganising the business of transport and collection, and so for
bringing into the world's pool, for the common advantage, the supplies
from which we are now disastrously cut off.... If we oppose in detail
every means by which Germany or Russia can recover their material
well-being, because we feel a national, racial, or political hatred for
their populations or their governments, we must be prepared to face the
consequences of such feelings. Even if there is no moral solidarity
between the newly-related races of Europe, there is an economic
solidarity which we cannot disregard. Even now, the world markets are
one. If we do not allow Germany to exchange products with Russia and so
feed herself, she must inevitably compete with us for the produce of the
New World. The more successful we are in snapping economic relations
between Germany and Russia, the more we shall depress the level of our
own economic standards and increase the gravity of our own domestic
problems.'[4]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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