§1.We have examined the chief defects in the structure of a business and a trade, regarded in the light of instruments of human welfare, and we have considered some of the remedies, applied sometimes for purposes of distinctively industrial economy, sometimes as devices of social therapeutics.
There remains, however, one other mode of economic antagonism deserving of consideration.Until modern times a nation was to all intents and purposes not only a political but an economic area, in the sense that almost all trade and other economic relations were confined within the national limit.
The small dimensions of foreign, as compared with domestic trade, and the nature of that trade, confined to articles not produced at home, had little tendency to generate a feeling of international rivalry.Foreign trade was almost wholly complementary and not competitive.With the modern changes, which have altered this condition and made nations appear to be hostile competitors in world commerce, we are all familiar.The development of capitalist production to a common level and along similar lines in a number of Western nations, the tendency towards an increase of output of manufactured goods at a price exceeding the demands of the existing markets, the consequent invasion of the markets of each industrial country by the goods of other countries, and the growing competition of the groups of traders in each nation to secure and develop new markets in the backward countries, with the assistance of the physical and military forces of their respective governments, have imposed upon the popular mind a powerful impression of economic opposition between nations.No falser and more disastrous delusion prevails in our time.The only facts which seem to give support to it are the Tariffs, Commercial Treaties and the occasional uses of political pressure and military force by States for the benefit of financiers, investors, traders or settlers belonging to their nationality.This intervention of governments for the supposed advantage of their citizens has had the unfortunate effect of presenting nations in the wholly false position of rival business firms.Groups of private manufacturers, traders and financiers, using their government to secure their private profitable ends, have thus produced grave conflicts of international policy.The worst instrument of this antagonism, because the most obvious and the most vexatious, is the protective Tariff, and the most singular proof of its derationalising efficacy is found in the conduct of our recent fiscal controversy.The fiercest fight in all that controversy has raged round the relative size, growth and profitable character of the foreign trade of Great Britain, Germany, America, etc.
These States are actually treated, not merely by Protectionists but by many Free Traders, as if they were great trading firms, engaged in struggling against one another for the exclusive possession of some limited economic territory, the success of one being attended by a loss to the others.Now, Great Britain, Germany and America are not economic entities at all; they are not engaged in world commerce, either as competitors or as cooperators;the respective advances or declines made by certain groups of merchants within their confines in overseas trade have no net national significance at all.Finally, overseas trade, by itself, furnishes no index of the collective prosperity of each nation.
§2.The whole presentation of the case under the head of Nations is irrelevant and deceptive, conveying, as it is designed to do, the false suggestion that Englishmen, grouped together as a people, are somehow competing with germans grouped together as another nation, and Americans as a third nation.Now no such collective competition exists at all.So far as trade involves competition, that competition takes place, not between nations, but between trading firms, and it is much keener and more persistent between trading firms belonging to the same nation than between those belonging to different nations.Birmingham or Sheffield firms compete with one another for machinery and metal contracts far more fiercely than they compete with Germans or Americans in the same trade, and so it is in every other industry.
