T INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION HE biggest thing going on in the world to-day, apart from the military war in Europe, is the vast undertaking of the British nation to weld into one close-working organization their national industries and commercial institutions for the trade contest to come, and the Germans' development of greater compactness in their own wonderful "super-organization" of the same kind. The British development is Empire-extensive. "We shall have, for some time to come, to continue State control and State organization," says Bonar Law. "Commercial competition is no longer a simple matter in which one individual pits his abilities against others and wins or loses by his own efforts," says The Times, of London. "Collectivism, to a large extent, must succeed individualism," says Sir Kinloch-Cooke, M.P.; "reforms that loom large on the horizon are wider co-operation and the extension of State control." In the following article, the German coördination of State and business activities for one cohesive organization of the nation's success is described. On page 21, Mr. Horner summarizes, to date, what England is doing. Separately, the proposed "British Trade Bank" is described. Among the newseditorials in this issue is other information also bearing significantly on this great subject. Now I am not going to be led into an ordinary Tariff Reform speech. I do not deny for a moment that under our Free Trade system this country has developed an amount of wealth and has accumulated resources which are not equalled by any other country in the world at this moment. If we are considering the question of strength in the war let something be said on the other side. Let the House remember that our command of the sea presumably does not depend on Free Trade because we had it long before we were a Free Trade country. If we could imagine this country being placed in the position in which Germany is, of having all her external trade cut off, I would ask. hon. members how long we would have been able to do what Germany has done-carry on the war in spite of that external trade. That shows that there are different kinds of resources and that from the point of view of military strength production is at least as important as commerce and shipping: I take the view that it is not unreasonable to think that, in a world convulsion like this, things have changed and that it is reasonable for everyone to look at the whole question involved in national and economical development from an entirely new point of view. In my belief the effect of a tariff is greatly exaggerated on both sides. It is really a question of organization more than of the method by which that organization is carried out. It requires only a sketchy familiarity with British commercial policy and her history of strongly maintained free organization of international trade; with the phenomenal drive of Germany, which expanded her industries and carried her business into every foreign market through the diametrically opposite national policy of using every artificial manipulation of a thoroughly coördinated and centrally directed organization of the nation's industrial and commercial facilities; and with the overpowering demand in England now for outdoing Germany in her own commercial methods, to see the significance of Bonar Law's statement about tariff and organization. It means British adoption not only of discriminatory tariff, but of a program of national coördination in home industry close an interest of Government in individual and in foreign trade, involving necessarily so business activities as to be, for Englishmen, almost revolutionary. |