MODERN FRANCE AND MODERN GERMANY.*
Da. CLAPHAM has written a valuable and much-needed book on the economic development of France and Germany since
Waterloo. The study of our own economic history is at last attracting much attention, but students do not go far without realizing that the movement of British trade and industry cannot be understood except in relation to foreign trade and foreign industry. British commerce was not conducted in a vacuum, but throughout the nineteenth century it was greatly affected by what was happening in the neighbouring countries and further afield. It is good to have a scholarly and dispas- sionate account of the progress of two of our chief customers and competitors, which throws much light on our own past and also elucidates some of the grave political problems of modern Europe. The main question treated by Dr. Clapham is, of course, the spreading of the industrial revolution from Great Britain to Franco and Germany, and its varied consequences in the two countries. One main result was the growing inter- dependence of the nations of Western Europe, which on the eve of the war had become united by many economic bonds, all to be rudely severed by Prussian violence. It is well known that Great Britain had the start of the Con- tinent by a whole generation in the development of modern large-scale industry with steam-driven machinery. The Revo- lutionary wars broke out just as France was beginning to borrow the new inventions and methods from us, and Great Britain went on alone for over twenty years, developing her textile industries and her iron trade. Even after Waterloo both France and Germany were slow, as Dr. Clapham points out, to adopt the new ideas. The Industrial Revolution in France was a very gradual change, never catastrophic and at times hardly perceptible, throughout the century. In Germany, too, the movement was for many years just as cautious and hesitating, gathering force in the sixties and at last becoming a veritable torrent after the Franco-Prussian War. Successive French Governments, before and after Napoleon as well as during his reign, strove to encourage the use of machinery, but France was short of coal. Half of her northern coalfield, round Lens, was not even surveyed in 1850. Belgium at that time raised more coal than France. Lack of coal meant lack of iron. When railways were introduced, the French ironworks could not meet the demand for rails, which had to be imported, though the duty was £11 a ton. The cotton industry grew steadily in and around Lille, but its chief seat was in Alsace, where by 1847 a third of the spindles in France were concentrated, while the power-loom was adopted oven more quickly than in Lanca- shire. The Orleanist Government kept the tariff very high, but French manufacturers held to the old ways, preferring as a rule the smaller risks of modest factories to the great risks of large undertakings on the British model. Germany, too, was slow to break with the past. Prussia had first to clear away the many inland custom-houses, maintained by the many small states, which strangled commerce. She accomplished this in part by means of the Zollverein of 1833—a Customs Union including all central Germany. She had also to construct roads and canals. All the time she was improving hor national system of secondary and technical education. After 1848, Prussia began rapidly to profit by these preliminary measures. Industry grew at an ever-increasing rate, until Germany, which bad been far in the rear, had overtaken and passed France and began to rival us. Little Belgium, meanwhile, had facilitated inter- national trade and benefited her own industries by deciding, as early as 1834, to construct State railways from Antwerp south- wards into France and from Ostend eastward to Liege and Germany.
Dr. Clapham devotes a striking chapter to " the stupendous industrial momentum of the imperial age" in Germany. He shows by well-selected figures how swiftly population and the output of every industry increased by leaps and bounds. Germany grow rich in a night, as it were, and the contrast between her abounding prosperity and her former poverty, constantly emphasized as it was by politicians and professors and journal- ists, may well have turned her head. She was reaping the
• Tits Sammie Development of Prance and Germany. 1815-1914. By J. H. Clapham. Cambridge : at the Unlvendty Press. flee. net.] reward of careful organization, in her highly trained bureau. cracy and her well-educated merchants and manufacturers, engineers, and chemists. But the moral effect upon her was evidently disastrous. Our own industrial revolution did not set class against class so definitely as did the German move. ment, nor did the Great Britain of Pitt and Castlereagh conceive designs for ruling the world as did the Germany of Bismarck and William II. France was happier in that her industrial development continued throughout at a slow pace, quickened somewhat by the Moline tariff of the early nineties, but never resembling the German onrush. The manufacturing interests of France were always subordinate to the landed interests-- the millions of solid peasant proprietors—whereas in Germany the industrialists rivalled even the great Prussian landowners in the control of the State and at times had the upper hand. Dr. Clapham traces in some valuable chapters the progress of rural France and rural Germany, and shows how much in both countries the co-operative movement assisted the peasantry, though the German peasant was not and is not as free a man as the French peasant. We are reminded that the great store which is now an ordinary feature of all large cities was a French invention, dating from the reign of Louis Philippe and developing rapidly under the Second Empire. Germany was very slow to follow the example, partly because her mediaeval fairs and markets survived with modifications through the nineteenth century. She was slow also to enlarge her banking system, though after 1871 it grew rapidly and exercised an immense influence by promoting the trusts and " cartels " which are the feature of modern German trade. In conclusion Dr. Clapham points out that in both countries, after a century of industrialism, the peasantry still formed the largest single economic group— larger in France than in Germany. The age-long fear of famine had been removed—a triumph of nineteenth-century progress which is usually ignored. The peasant was better fed and better clothed than he had ever been before. In 1914 the workman was far better off than he had been fifty years earlier, though ho was not so well off as the British workman. " English specialists noted, in the ten years before the war, that German rags were not quite so good as they used to be. This is a 1511113 test ; for prosperous nations and classes throw away their clothes early." On the material side, then, the survey of a century's economic development is reassuring. With the moral side Dr. Clapham is not concerned, but his book enables us to understand why social discontent grew in Germany behind the imposing facade of Hohenzollern industrialism.
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