The economic aspect of the problem of disarmament is strangely neglected, or avoided, by the sanguine prophets of the peace movement. There are vague allusions to an economic difficulty, but it dims not the large and enviable hope of the peacemakers. Yet, if M. F. Passy and his associates made a careful analysis of that seeming “inertia” of the nations before their great idea, they would find that industrial hopes and fears are very largely responsible for it. In a commercial age, so intent and so materialistic as ours is, economic interest is one of the gravest factors that can enter into a social or political problem. If such an interest, of a considerable magnitude, is superadded to the obstacles in the way of a solution, one needs the faith of a Tolstoi to raise oneself to a cheerful optimism.
The problem of disarmament is complicated to an alarming extent by economic interests. So closely is militarism woven into the fabric of the modern industrial world, that its destruction, in the present order of things, would cause a dislocation and a chaos which neither capital nor labour is willing to contemplate. There is a fallacy in acting always on a broad view of the industrial world. Its constituent elements do not take broad views. Practical experience has taught them the stiff, unwieldy character of our economic world, and so they shrink from the theorist who lightly transfers or transforms huge streams of labour or capital, in his own ideas. It is clear that the destruction, or appreciable curtailment, of military activity, would gravely disturb existing economic conditions. Hence, those who are dependent upon and directly interested in the actual order of things hesitate to take the leap into the unknown which would be involved in such an industrial change. That is one serious element in the sentiment of the nations, which governments and prophets do well to examine.
FIN DE L’EXTRAIT
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ISBN : 978-1-909782-16-7