Economic Problems of the Nations

a) Wars and Armaments

When difficulties between nations arise, they are settled by compacts and agreements, or by submitting the matters in dispute to some arbiter after agreeing to accept his decision; but there are instances in which these pacific measures do not, as a fact, serve, and nations attempt to vindicate their rights or claims by force of arms. Now, in spite of the horrible character of war—which has been called, somewhat dramatically but not without show of justice, ‘‘legalized wholesale murder”—there are times when a nation is justified in undertaking it. There is such a thing as unjust aggression, which brings a certain threat of ruin, and which cannot be repelled without force. Nations are, in many points, like human individuals, and singularly so in their quarrels and disputes. And as a man would be an intolerable nuisance, and one to be restrained by force, if he went dbout attacking his neighbors physically, so a trouble-making nation or State is to be restrained, if Heed be by force of arms, when it seeks to ruin another! nation, to enslave it, or to enrich itself at the expeh.se of another. Conversely, a man whose life, liberty, or bodily integrity is the subject of unjust and forceful attack, or whose home and family are suddenly and unjustly threatened with violence, oppression, or destruction of virtue, will naturally and justifiably use force to repel the aggression, even if he foresees that his action of defence will occasion the injury or even the death of the unjust aggressor. And $o it is among nations. A nation which attacks another unjustly, or which, without declaration of war, subjects the other to such treatment as amounts to a most grave and unwarranted aggression, may certainly be repelled by armed force. Wars can be just—^on one side at least. But a just and lawful war has always the nature of defence. And such a war will ever be a just and lawful war in spite of the very laudable efforts of statesmen and sociologists to outlaw war and to disarm the world. But a just war is, we repeat, always a defence; further, it is always the very last resource, the sole means available to repel most grave, most unjust, and most destructive aggression. But if war can be just, it can also be unjust. And indeed injustice, on the one side or the other, is always present. Usually, of course, each nation party to an armed conflict feels, rightly or wrongly, that its cause is just. Probably nearly every war involves mingled issues, with justice and injustice found in some measure on either side. Surely, this fact should appeal to governors and governing bodies as a most compelling reason to refrain as long as possible from the declaration of war; it should lead them to sift out the precise nature of each point of dispute, to discern in every detailed instance where justice lies, and to compose the whole matter by seemly compact or by arbitration. But nations, like individual men, are quickly aroused to anger; they see their wrongs through the distorting lens of fevered imagination; they nurse injuries, real and fancied; they minimize their own faults, try to justify their own crimes, and magnify the dangers that seem to threaten. The jingoist is ever loud in marketplace, council chamber, and sanctum. The nationalist is always ready to feed the growing fever. Some sudden incident is interpreted as a crafty movement of the hated enemy, the first action of a plot that threatens to bring ruin. And so comes war. Now, war is almost always an inept method of seeing justice done. A man may repel an unjust attack, meeting force with force, and be entirely successful. But the clash of nations is never so simple a matter as the battling of individuals. The honest historian, reviewing the wars of all the world, weighing their cost in seas of human blood, viewing their effects in human amity destroyed and vicious hatreds spread abroad, studying results achieved in the name of justice and peace, must write against the gruesome litany, not “Success,” not “Glory,” not “Achievement,” but the dismal word “Failure!” Nearly every war terminates in a merely temporary settlement of disputed issues. The treaty of peace which brings a war to an end is almost sure to impose harsh and humiliating requirements upon the conquered nation. The victor hardly ever refrains from placing his heel upon the neck of the fallen foe. Woe td the vanquished! And thus the treaty of peace is usually an effective instrument in preparing another war. Few wars are really finished. We have a striking example of this fact in the World War and its settlement by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. At the present moment, the fruits of that treaty, and the continuation of that war, are visible in the political and social turmoil which prevails in Europe, and out of this turmoil, sooner or later, may come another war. While war is undoubtedly a problem of tremendous moral import, we consider it here in its economic aspects. The money cost of war is enormous. Merely to quote the billions of dollars that are spent on its destructive implements; merely to state that it impoverishes the world, would not be to put the matter in terms immediately intelligible to the rank and file of us who are not accustomed to dealing in millions and billions. Perhaps the whole matter may be left with a single striking quotation from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (cited in The Reader’s Digest, August, 1934): “The World War, all told, cost—apart from thirty million lives—four hundred billion dollars. With that money we could have built a $2500 house, furnished it with $1000 worth of furniture, placed it on five acres of land worth $100 an acre, and given this home to each and every family in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia. We could have given to each city of 20,000 inhabitants and over, in each country named, a five million dollar library and a ten million dollar university. Out of what was left we could have set aside a sum at five percent that would provide a $1000 yearly salary for an army of 125,000 teachers, and a like salary for another army of 125,000 nurses.” Sociologists and statesmen seem pretty well agreed that the problem of war will not be solved until nations can be prevailed upon to disarm. The problem of war thus becomes the problem of armaments. And this problem is admittedly a very difficult one. It will not do for one nation to disarm; all must agree— afid must live up to the agreement—to reduce armaments to an absolute minimum or to abolish them altogether. And to have all nations meet in such an agreement seems, at the present time, something of a futile hope. Still, the current agitation for worldwide disarmament is a very good thing. It keeps the public mind on an important subject; it arouses general indignation at the cost of wars and armaments; it tends to make governing bodies slow to incur public displeasure by spending the people’s money upon armaments and war preparations which, once highly effective, constitute in themselves an aqtual danger and a threat of war. For, as the strong and belligerent man will stand no nonsense and may by said to be always “looking for trouble,” so the nation well prepared for war and confident in the strength of its armaments, is only too likely to feel the temptation to try its power, and to make proof of its warlike ability at the slightest opportunity.

b) Population and Food-supply

In 1798 the world was startled by the appearance of a work called An Essay on the Principle of Population. The author was Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an English economist and an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. Malthus declared that the population of the world tends to increase according to geometrical progression, while the means of sustenance increase only by arithmetical progression, thus: Population: i, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc., Food-Supply: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.

To keep the peoples of the earth from a miserable end by starvation, Malthus suggested that many persons refrain from marrying, or marry only late in life, and that married couples practise continence. Malthus was a Christian, and he had no thought of spreading the pernicious practice of Birth Control by use of artificial and unnatural means. But those who followed his theory (which, by the bye, is wholly fallacious) were not all Christians, and, in special, the neo-Malthusians of to-day who preach Birth Control and seek to justify it on economic grounds, are anti-Christian in their theory and practice. It is a gratuitous and a groundless postulate that population increases by geometric progression, and food-supply by arithmetical progression. Production has always kept pace with population. Malthus has been in his grave these hundred years, and to-day we are trying to keep down production, for it has run so far ahead of the demand that those whose livelihood depends upon the sale of food-stuffs are impoverished and left in a broken-down business. In 1934, Mr. H. A. Wallace, U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, declared that unless we can reduce tariffs and, ship our surplus products abroad, we may have to retire permanently 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 acres of productive land in the United States alone. So far have intensive farming and improved machinery carried us ahead of the productive possibilities foreseeable in Malthus’ day. It is the sober opinion of many economists that the earth could support double or treble its present population without improvement in the present means of production; and, even if no improved methods of production are invented (which is hjardly to be thought of), that the world stands in no danger of over-population for two or three centuries to come. The plain fact is that the world stands in no danger of over-population at all. On the contrary, what npw threatens is a rapidly decreasing birthrate, especially among the people who profess to have the bes( of blood and culture to pass on to their progeny. Besides, the productive power of the earth is fairly constant, and subject only to the law of diminishing returns, which is offset by new inventions; but there is no constancy in the increase of population. Wars, pestilences, famines, floods, earthquakes, are extraordinary disasters which frequently take terrible toll of the earth’s peoples, and these, added to the normal death rate, keep the population evet below the possibility of exhausting the productive powers of the land and the abundant generosity of the waters.

Summary of the Article

In this brief Article we have discussed the economic aspects of wars and armaments, of population and food supply. We have studied the nature and the causes of wars. We have found that wars are mostly unjustified, that they are nearly always inept methods of achieving justice among nations, and that wars beget other wars. We have noticed the tremendous economic cost of wars, and, by an apt quotation from reliable authority, we have seen the tremendous cost of the recent World War; this we have taken as a single and sufficing example of the expensiveness of wars in general. We have discussed the value of the modern effort for worldwide disarmament. Finally, we have given brief notice to the Malthusian doctrine of population and food supply. We have seen that this doctrine is wholly fallacious, and that the danger which the world faces to-day is not over-population but underpopulation.

THE END