THE FEEDERS OF WAR
THE war that has been in progress . for the past two years in an almost impenetrable swamp on the frontiers of Bolivia and Paraguay has been dragged from the obscurity its remoteness conferred on it, and displayed naked before the world by the report issued by a League of Nations Commission last Saturday. The Conunission, which included British, French and Mexican soldiers and Italian and Spanish diplomatists, has carried through a thankless task with competent thoroughness and expressed its conclusions in language of wholesome vigour and clarity. The rights and wrongs of the dispute out of which the war arose are irrelevant at this stage. All that need be said.is that oil in large quantities is believed to exist in the Gran Chaco, the disputed territory, and that all the efforts of would- be peacemakers, of the four major South American Governments and of the International Conference of American States, no less than of the League of Nations, have totally failed. As a result war on what, for such countries, is a grand scale is raging. " The armies engaged," says the League Commission, " are using up-to-date material—aeroplanes, armoured cars, flame- projectors, quick-firing guns, machine-guns and auto- matic rifles." " The struggle," it observes, " is a singu- larly pitiless and horrible one. The sick and wounded frequently receive inadequate attention. . . . Behind the lines, while the struggle goes on, both countries are growing poorer and poorer and their future seems darker and darker. The young men are at the front ; the universities are closed. . . . The Chaco war represents a veritable catastrophe to civilization in that part of America."
Such is the dispassionate verdict of commissioners, most of them themselves soldiers, who have studied the situation on the spot. Their report inspires many reflections, but one beyond all others. How are the belligerent countries obtaining the instruments of war ? Neither of them is an industrial country. It may be questioned whether either could manufacture so much as a machine-gun. Yet each has at its disposal aero- planes, flame-projeetors, armoured cars and every other appurtenance of an enlightened civilization engaged in settling its differences by the time-honoured method. The explanation, of course, is obvious enough, and the League Commission states it explicitly : " The arms and material of every kind are not manufactured locally, but are supplied to the belligerents by American and European countries." So the war broadens out. It is not after all a mere Latin American affair from which Europe can dissociate itself in censorious rectitude. It is Europe's war and all America's war, for without supplies from Europe and industrial America it would dwindle down to a fracas entailing nothing much worse than broken heads. That is a profoundly repugnant reflection, and it is no bad thing that so flagrant a conse- quence of the traffic in arms and the private manu- facture of armaments should be thrust thus insistently on public attention. " It is a horrible thing," said Sir John Simon in the House of Conunons in February of last year, " that profit should be made out of the supply of the means of provoking fighting which is neither necessary nor just." It is horrible, and the Foreign Secretary, in voicing what he described as a deep and sincere sentiment, widely held, made it clear enough that he shared the sentiment himself.
So did many members of former British Cabinets, includ- ing notably those-who approved in 1919 that article of the League which declares that " the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections." That it is in fact open to very grave objection no candid student of modern history can deny. The Bolivia-Paraguay war, kept alive by the private manufacturer and no one else, is only one illustration of many. The system, of course, is convenient. Any nation must be ready to expand its armament output enormously in time of war, and its Government is saved large expenditure in time of peace if private manufacturers, financed by private capital, are willing to maintain plant, supplementary to the Government dockyards and arsenals, that will be available for the national service the moment a crisis comes. Hence the system continues. But its existence entails certain consequences. Private armament firms are ordinary business concerns. They have shareholders who demand dividends. They must get orders where they can year by year and month by month. They must supply any Government in any continent which will buy from them—the Governments, for example, of Bolivia and Paraguay. And it stands to reason that if Bolivia and Paraguay place orders in peace time, when arma- ments are a mere precaution, they will multiply them ten and twentyfold when mar breaks out and munitions are a matter of life and death. No one will seriously expect the armament firms of this or any other country to refuse of their own volition the influx of orders that comes to them at such a time.
But if armament firms have not a moral duty in this matter, Governments most emphatically have. It is from that point of view that the problem of private manufacture, and the kindred problem of the traffic in arms, demand attention afresh. It is a horrible thing, it may be repeated, that war should be to anyone's financial interest, that, in other words, there should be financial temptation to anyone to foment a war or foster its continuance. To say that is to bring no charge against any individual armament manufacturers, least of all against British manufacturers, who export only under Government licence, and regarding the chief of whom, Vickers Armstrong, it was stated at the annual meeting of the firm in March that it had no connexion with armament rings in any other country or any influence over any newspaper. That, it may be remarked, is far from being the case with the armament industries in certain Continental countries. The abolition of private manufacture -would be by no means a simple matter. The difficulties in the way could be set out at some length. But they are not insuperable. Otherwise a country so severely practical as France, which possesses 107 private armament firms against 41 State works, would not have proposed, as she did a year ago; the nationalization of arms manufacture everywhere. The argument is the same as that for the nationalization of the drink traffic, that these are fields in .which it is inexpedient that considerations of private profit should have play. The proposal has been neither accepted nor rejected at Geneva, and it imperatively demands further consideration. • One of the strongest grounds for the suppression of private manufacture is • that it would facilitate joint action by Governments- in cutting off supplies to belligerents, for at present they hesitate to take a course that would penalize important interests in their own countries. Such considerations should not prevail. Armament firms ought to work consciously subject to that risk. If it does not pay them to carry on under such conditions they can concentrate their energies entirely on the other departments of their business from which, in this country at least, they derive much of their profit. In regard to the Bolivia-Paraguay war the Governments have plainly failed in their duty. In a case like the present, where both sides have refused the peace proposals put forward by the League, and insist on continuing the war, the means to continue it ought to be immediately cut off. " The neighbouring coun- tries," say the League Commissioners, " if the two belligerents refused to accept an honourable and just settlement, could exercise a strict control over transit traffic as a complement to the control that other nations could exercise over certain exports." What the " certain exports " are hardly needs to be specified. The League States may still take the one right and proper course, and the United States of America, whose co-operation is essential, may still extend it. The necessary powers were conferred on the President last year. To con- template a failure of the collective system in a ease in which the application of its principles would be at once so practicable and so effective would be deplorable in the last degree.
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