THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

DO not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong with foreign trade as such. We could have no gold without foreign trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I will not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think that we should be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant. It is safer and probably healthier for a nation to live on the food and drink it can itself produce, as the Esquimaux manage to do under much harder conditions. But there are many necessaries of a high civilization that nations cannot find within their own boundaries, and must buy from oneanother. We must trade and travel and come to know oneanother all over the habitable globe. We have to make international institutions as well as national ones, beginning with Trading Treaties and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and going on to the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade, and the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of art, literature, and science, have forced them to make international agreements and treaties with oneanother which are making an end of “keeping ourselves to ourselves”, and throwing half bricks at foreigners and strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us into trouble.

Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it often did—at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag, when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions. Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes, the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of the annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last drop of their blood for “the integrity of the Empire”; and they did in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity. In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us. India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how loth our Capitalism was to let them go.

On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did not dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a costly fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We give them preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy protective duties against us. We allow them to be represented at international congresses as if they were independent nations. We even allow them access to the King independently of the London Cabinet. The result is that they hang on to us with tyrannical devotion, waving the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the Americans wave the Stars and Stripes. And this is not because they are of our own race. The Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the Irish and their leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race with us only in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us just as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may be Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and the Irish Free State heading her Imperialist opponents.

But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations and loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically: we allow them to do it for themselves, and to call the process self-government. Whilst we persisted in governing them they blamed us for all the evils Capitalism brought upon them; and they finally refused to endure our government. When we left them to govern themselves they became less and less hostile to us. But the change always impoverishes them, and leaves them in comparative disorder. The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still oppress them. Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien government ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State becomes more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in 1913 than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal allowance of self-government cannot reconcile people as long as their capitalists are competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen and Englishmen, Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is infringed. Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get rid of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time without distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have freed themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than ever, if we are fools enough to let it.

Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism. Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And, as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to fetch a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine.