The production of import and export figures, and of balances of trade, under national headings, is a mischievous pandering to the most dangerous delusion of the age.
It has done more than anything else to hide the great and beneficent truth, that the harmony and solidarity of economic interests among mankind have at last definitely transcended national limits, and are rapidly binding members of different nations in an ever-growing network of cooperation.
Within the last generation a more solid and abiding foundation for this cooperation than ordinary exchange of goods has been laid in the shape of international finance.Though certain dangerous abuses have attended its beginnings, this cooperation of the citizens of various countries in business enterprises in all parts of the world is the most potent of forces making for peace and progress.More rapidly than is commonly conceived, it is bringing into existence a single economic world-state with an order and a government which are hardly the less authoritative because, as yet, they possess a slender political support.That economic world-state consists of all that huge area of industrially developed countries in regular and steady intercourse, linked to one another by systems of railroads and steamship routes, by postal and telegraphic services, administered by common arrangements, by regular commerce, common markets and reliable modes of monetary payment, and by partnerships of capital and labour in common business transactions.
§3.The actuality of this world-system has preceded its conscious realisation.But the growing fact is educating the idea and the accompanying sentiment in the minds of the more enlightened members of all civilised nations.We hear more of internationalism from the side of labour.But, in point of fact, the corporate unity of labour lags far behind that of capital.For the mobility of capital is much greater, and its distribution is far better organised.But, as the financial machinery for the collection and distribution of industrial power over the whole economic world is further perfected and unified, it will be attended by a loosening of those local and national bonds which have hitherto limited the free movement of labour.
As the centre of gravity in the economic system shifts from land, which is immovable, to money, the most mobile of economic factors, so the old local attachment which kept most labour fastened to some small plot of the earth, its native village, will yield place to liberty of movement accommodated to the needs and opportunities of modern profitable business.
Within the limits of each country the increased mobility has long been evident: it has helped to break up parochialism and provincialism of ideas and feelings, and to evolve a stronger sense of national unity.But there is to be no halting at the limits of the nation.Already large forces of international labour exist.Not merely do vast numbers of workers migrate with increased ease from Belgium into France, from Russia into the United States, from Germany into South America, for settlement in these countries, but large bodies of wage-earners are being organised as a cosmopolitan labour force following the currents of industrial development about the world.So far as unskilled labour is concerned, large tracts of China, India and the Straits Settlements, form a recruiting ground in Asia; while Italy and Austro-Hungary furnish a large European contingent.But not less significant are the higher ranks of cosmopolitan labour, the British and American managers, overseers and workmen in the engineering, railroad, electrical and mining industries, who to-day are moving so freely over the newly developing countries of three continents, placing their business and technical ability at the service of the economic world.The new movements in the economic development of Asia and of South America will enormously accelerate this free flow of business ability and technical skill from the more advanced Western nations over the relatively backward countries, and will also bring into closer cooperation at a larger number of points the capital and management of Western peoples.
My object in referring to these concrete economic movements of our time is to illustrate the powerful tendencies which are counteracting the old false realisation of industry in terms of human competition and antagonism, and are making for a conscious recognition of its cooperative and harmonious character.
