The War After the War | Page 4

stood, therefore, as a living defiance to the renewal of all commercial relations with the Central Powers. But he went further than this: He decreed trade extermination of the enemy--merciless war beyond the war.
With his first speech in England Hughes created a sensation. Before he came commercial feeling against Germany ran high. Hughes crystallised it into a definite cry. He said what eight out of every ten men in the street were thinking. His voice became the Voice of Empire. Up and down England and before cheering crowds he preached the doctrine of trade war to the death on Germany. He denounced the laxness that had permitted the "German taint to run like a cancer through the fair body of English trade"; he urged complete economic independence of the Dominions. His persistent plea was, "We must have the fruits of victory"; and those fruits, he declared, comprised all the trade that Germany had hitherto enjoyed, and as much more as could be lawfully gained.
He urged that the blood brotherhood of empire, quickened by that dramatic S.O.S. call for men across the sea and cemented by the common trench hazard, be followed by a union of empire after the war that should be self-sufficient. Behind all this eloquent talk of protection and prohibition lay the first real menace to America's new place as a world trade power. It was the opening call to arms for the war after the war.
Hughes did more than set England to thinking in imperial terms. He upset most of the calculations of the Powers That Be who invited him. They expected an amiable, able and plastic counsellor; they got an oratorical live wire, who would not be ruled, and who shocked deep-rooted free-trade convictions to the core. He helped to launch a whole new era of thought and action; and the next chapter of its progress was now to be recorded under circumstances pregnant with meaning for the whole universe of trade.
The second winter of war had passed, and with it much of the dark night that enshrouded the Allies' arms. On land and sea rained the first blows of the great assaults that were to make a summer of content for the Entente cause. Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit; victory, however distant, seemed at last assured. The time had come to prepare a new kind of drive--the combined attack upon enemy trade and any other that happened to be in the way.
Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked the Seine, in Paris. Eminent lawmakers--Hughes, of Australia, among them--were there aplenty; but few practical business men.
On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic flowed in happier and serener days. For coming generations of business everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic Conference of the Allies was about to reshape those maps and change the channels of commerce.
All the while, and less than a hundred miles away, Verdun seethed with death; still nearer brewed the storm of the Somme.
These men were assembled to fix the price of all this blood and sacrifice, and they did. In what has come to be known as the Paris Pact they bound themselves together by economic ties and pledged themselves to present a united economic front. They unfurled the banner of aggressive reprisal with the sole object of crushing the one-time business supremacy of their foes.
The chief recommendations were: To meet, by tariff discrimination, boycott or otherwise, any individual or organised trade advance of the Central Powers--already Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria have reached a commercial understanding; to forego any "favoured-nation" relation with the enemy for an indefinite period; to conserve for themselves, "before all others," their natural resources during the period of reconstruction; to make themselves independent of enemy countries in the raw materials and manufactured products essential to their economic well-being; and to facilitate this exchange by preferential trade among themselves, and by special and state subsidies to shipping, railroads and telegraphs. Another important decree prohibits the enemy from engaging in certain industries and professions, such as dyestuffs, in allied countries when these industries relate to national defence or economic independence.
In short, self-sufficiency became the aim of the whole allied group, to be achieved without the aid or consent of any other nation or group of nations, be they friends or foes.
Here, then, is the strategy that will rule after the war. A huge allied monopoly is projected--a sort of monster militant trust, with cabinets of ministers for directorates, armies and navies as trade scouts, and whole roused citizenships for salesmen.
Throughout this new Bill