perhaps less so in proportion as they have progressively come under the rule of the new order in industry and in business.
There is an increasingly evident cleavage of interest between industry and business, or between production and ownership, or between tangible performance and free income, -- one phrase may serve as well as another, and neither is quite satisfactory to mark the contrast of interest between the common man on the one hand and the vested interests and kept classes on the other hand.
But it should be sufficiently plain that the national establishment and its control of affairs has a value for the vested interests different from what it has for the underlying community.
Quite plainly the new order in industry has no use or place for national discrimination or national pretensions of any kind;
and quite plainly such a phrase as "national integrity" has no shadow of meaning for this new industrial order which overruns national frontiers and overcomes national discrimination as best it can, in all directions and all the time. For industry as carried on under the new order, the overcoming of national discrimination is part of the ordinary day's work. But it is otherwise with the new order of business enterprise, --
large-scale, corporate, resting on intangible assets, and turning on free income which flows from managerial sabotage. The business community has urgent need of an efficient national establishment both at home and abroad. A settled government, duly equipped with national pretensions, and with legal and military power to maintain the sacredness of contracts at home and to enforce the claims of its business men abroad, -- such an establishment is invaluable for the conduct of business, though its industrial value may not unusually be less than nothing.
Industry is a matter of tangible performance in the way of producing goods and services. And in this connection it is well to recall that a vested interest is a prescriptive right to get something for nothing. Now, any project of reconstruction, the scope and method of which are governed by considerations of tangible performance, is likely to allow only a subsidiary consideration or something less to the legitimate claims of the vested interests, whether they are vested interests of business or of privilege. It is more than probable that in such a case national pretensions in the way of preferential concessions in commerce and investment will be allowed to fall into neglect, so far as to lose all value to any vested interest whose fortunes they touch. These things have no effect in the way of net tangible performance. They only afford ground for preferential pecuniary rights, always at the cost of someone else; but they are of the essence of things in that pecuniary order within which the vested interests of business live and move. So also such a matter-of-fact project of reconstruction will be likely materially to revise outstanding credit obligations, including corporation securities, or perhaps even bluntly to disallow claims of this character to free income on the part of beneficiaries who can show no claim on grounds of current tangible performance. All of which is inimical to the best good of the vested interests and the kept classes.
Reconstruction which partakes of this character in any sensible degree will necessarily be viewed with the liveliest apprehension by the gentlemanly statesmen of the old school, by the kept classes, and by the captains of finance. It will be deplored as a subversion of the economic order, a destruction of the country's wealth, a disorganisation of industry, and a sure way to poverty, bloodshed, and pestilence. In point of fact, of course, what such a project may be counted on to subvert is that dominion of ownership by which the vested interests control and retard the rate and volume of production. The destruction of wealth, in such a case will touch, directly, only the value of the securities, not the material objects to which these securities have given title of ownership; it would be a disallowance of ownership, not a destruction of useful goods. Nor need any disorganisation or disability of productive industry follow from such a move; indeed, the apprehended cancelment of the claims to income covered by negotiable securities would by that much cancel the fixed overhead charges resting on industrial enterprise, and so further production by that much. But for those persons and classes whose keep is drawn from prescriptive rights of ownership or of privilege the consequences of such a shifting of ground from vested interest to tangible performance would doubtless be deplorable. In short, "Bolshevism is a menace"; and the wayfaring man out of Armenia will be likely to ask: A menace to whom?
