Siu,—Perhaps the excellent comments of Dr. Jacks on treaties could
be carried still further. Ever since the War, it seems to me, there has been a conflict (e.g., Keynes on the Versailles reparations clauses) between those who seek to impose politically ambitious treaties, on hard facts—largely economic facts—and those who, are. more inclined to let international relationships be flexibly, regulated by the facts themselves. France, a country . of peasant proprietors. deeply conservative and to a great extent self-supporting, Would like to believe that a country should and can still regulate her national economy in isolation. She is reluctant to recognise that the outbursts of militant nationalism today in Germany, Italy and Japan are due not simply to moral perversity, but very largely to a fear of economic starvation. Each of these countries feels that its national life is threatened by the power of other countries—notably the British Empire —to withhold from it raw materials and eventually food supplies.
I know that Empire countries are only too anxious to sell raw materials to any customer able to buy them. But the anxiety of the "have-nots " is not quite unjustified, for the British Empire, by adopting a protective tariff policy, could —and already partly does—make it impossible for other countries to pay for British raw materials ; and in an emergency, such as war, supplies could be cut off altogether.
hence the futility of a political treaty which does nothing to assuage this fear ; and it is a welcome sign that this is at last being widely admitted, as shown in the proposal to follow a revision of Locarno by a world economic conference.
The essential assumption to overcome, I feel, is that political control over a territory implies an absolute right to dispose of its economic resources. It should, instead, be recognised that the world's natural wealth belongs to the world as a whole, and that its production and exchange need to be organised on a world-wide settle independently of politics. There would then be no need for any country to argue that in order to escape economic starvation it must expand its national territory. On the other hand, the existence of a World-wide economic organisation would not prevent any country from fully maintaining its own distinctive national way of life mid its own cultural traditions: There would be no political merging of countries into a world-state ; all that would happen is that world trade—already international in scope and purpose—would be free to organise itself to meet human needs anywhere, independently of political frontiers.
A Utopian dream, perhaps. Clearly, the difficulties of persuading countries that national ownership of the earth's resources leads to poverty and war must be immense, and so must the difficulties of providing the new economic institutions necessary for the conduct of world trade as a self-governing enterprise. But the first step toward practical reform is right thinking. So long as we go on thinking polit ically about economics 'we shall have political wars caused by economic hunger ; and no political treaties will stop these wars. If economic resources and economic needs were set free to satisfy one another, we should be' able largely to replace treaties with economic agreements which would be real and reliable because they would be a formulatiOn of existent facts. And as the facts varied, so would the formulations be free to vary without causing political dis- turbance. We should still need treaties ; they would be concerned with such questions as the cultural rights of minorities and coloured races, with immigration and the distribution of languages. They would not always be easy to make, but we should be able to approach them in an atmosphere free from that fevered nationalism which is caused by a fear that economic power may 'be used by one country to destroy the national heritage of another.—Yours faithfully,
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