Читать книгу Economic Development in Denmark Before and During the World War онлайн

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Causes of warfare are always partly economic and those which incited the recent one were mainly so. The business plans of a powerful state reached to the ends of the earth and so crossed and interlaced the claims of other states that some writers, then and afterwards, pronounced the war inevitable. If we assume a settled purpose on the part of such a state to encroach on the rights of others, we may say that it doubtless was inevitable. The victory of the defending countries has saved them from an immediate and intolerable domination, but it cannot be taken as an assured fact that similar attempts will never again be made. The economic inducement continues and the means may at some time be forthcoming.

Within the several states war has democratized industry, giving to labour an increase of control a change that, if continued, will entail momentous consequences; but still greater effects have been produced on the relations of states to each other. The world as a whole has changed more than its component parts, and the new relation of the parts to one another is the critical element in the situation. The great increase in the economic functions of governments is one cause of this condition. Within the great international community in which the several states are units extensive economic functions have gravitated into the hands of governments and caused them to face each other as business rivals and to deal with each other in a multitude of ways in which the merely self-seeking policy of private business is intolerable. Power to invoke principles of justice and international law as interpreted by a competent court has become an indispensable means of allaying strife, and this fact exalts to supreme importance the high court of nations which has just been established. It magnifies also the importance of the economic ​facts and principles with which the law itself will have to deal. It is not merely individual men or private corporations who now meet each other in the rough and tumble of a worldwide mart but states themselves, each representing its own population and seeking to foster its interests as a zealous and faithful agent. The chances of friction that are inherent in ordinary commerce inhere to-day in vast international transactions and will increase in the measure in which the intercourse grows. All this means a great increase in incentives to warfare, on the one hand, and in the motives for preventing it, on the other. Private commerce unites more than it separates those who participate in it, and it remains to be seen whether international commerce will act in the same way; but, in view of what modern war means, the human race will deserve to perish, and much of it will probably do so, if the forces of strife are allowed to get the upper hand. Whether they will or not—whether the recent economic changes will tend to reduce warfare or to increase it—depends on the ability of nations to create and maintain the instrumentalities that in the new state of the world are necessary.