America "X" Europe
Carter, John
~ugust 28, r929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 4r7 AMERICA "X" EUROPE By JOHN CARTER OR the last ten years, in the mathematics of world economy discus- sion has been dominated by...
...Minor spasms of economic nationalism are to be expected and are occurring...
...Every student is struck by the modern note of the oldest Gaelic writings, as in the worldly wisdom of King Cormac's Instructions, or the monk's droll poem to his cat...
...Nevertheless, as the reader will yather, troubled waters are not yet coated with tranquilliziny oiL--The Editors...
...The most important of these is economic and financial collaboration, which grows because it is practical...
...They have been mobbed in Paris and swindled in every city, town and hamlet west of Warsaw...
...Her priests retain that homely ease which was their conquering gift when her missions...
...Gaelic literature intellectually is a literature of rest, not of change: of intensive cultivation, not of experiment...
...x" in this case not only suggests the Unknown Quantity--that factor which stands in international business as the Unknown Soldier of Economics--but also the very simple but rather mysterious process of multiplication...
...We find America and Japan and the European nations cooperating to prevent war between Russia and China...
...They have been caricatured mand welcomed...
...they diverge at many points, as do the interests of any two nations or of any two sections within a nation...
...Ever since the Fordney-McCumber tariff of I922, denunciations of our high protectionism have been common, and the present tariff revision brings merely a repetition on a grand scale of all the arguments which have ever been brought to bear against our effort to direct the currents of our foreign trade in the interest of our domestic producers...
...Yet we find that every nation on the continent has raised its tariff since the war, that free-trade England has adopted the protective principle in the McKenna duties and the Safeguarding of Industries, and that all indications point to yet further increase in European duties...
...The League of Nations and the Kellogg pact were for a time regarded as rival systems for assuring peace...
...Reduced to its simplest terms, the inter-continental argument has raged over the question of whether the twentieth century is to be the century of America Europe and dmerica, says Mr...
...They have warned us to have nothing to do with Europe, have deplored every sign of a tendency to assimilate our interests to those of Europe and have made the test of every case a determination whether it implied closer relations with the old world, rather than whether it was to the advantage of the new...
...Here, too, is the thought of a virile nation that has carried a mediaeval mentality into the present age...
...The League of Nations and the Kellogg pact might conceivably find themselves in opposition...
...But for Ireland, the works of art which that period has bequeathed to us would be lifeless and soulless...
...The same life, the same mode of thought, appear in the eighteenth century as in the eighth...
...it would be dangerous if they were to do so, for it would indicate an unhealthy state of subservience or fear...
...Carter in the followiny paper are not incompatible or separated by conflictiny basic interests...
...Two cardinal principles of modern economic America are willingly being given currency on the continent, which is apparently entirely disposed to accept a technique offering the possibility of greater prosperity for the average man, in or out of business...
...Proper to an open-air life is an intellectual simplicity...
...When Stanley, the explorer, spoke in Manchester on behalf of Afri418 THE COMMONWEAL August 28, I929 can missions, he was received with courtesy, but when he pointed out that Christianity would inculcate modesty among the natives and reckoned the millions of yards of cotton cloth which would be necessary to clothe the shame-struck Negroes, an audience of cotton manufacturers rose to its feet and cheered...
...While, therefore, political phenomena have existed and do exist at the present moment to justify all tile predications made by both parties to the debate on "Which shall be the master, America or Europe ?"--as a young French economist entitled his book--economic multiplicity has built and is building a structure of collaboration between the two worlds which quietly ignores all contradictory political appearances...
...Surviving Gaelic literature amounts in volume to many times that of classical Rome...
...And most significant of all, we learn that one of the proposed banks' most important functions will be to stabilize European currencies, a function which has hitherto been voluntarily exercised by the Federal Reserve system in co6peration with the European banks of issue...
...However, when you have mentioned the anti-American commercial propaganda (which is really an oblique and none too intelligent way of advertising European wares) the war debt propaganda, and the anti-tariff propaganda, you have exhausted the possibilities of the old method of reckoning economic relations on a political basis...
...Filene of Boston supplying the Labor Bureau with the funds to ascertain these wages...
...During the recent speculation on the stock exchange, while the Federal Reserve Board was trying to reduce brokers loans in order to protect European gold reserves from depletion, European banks were rushing funds to Wall Street to invest in brokers loans...
...Tradem or economics--has a way of surmounting even the most formidable obstacles...
...So it goes...
...Actually, of course, what is happening is something of a far greater complexity than so highly simplified an equation...
...that never has accepted industrialism and the city, and that must live on if the Gael himself is not to disappear...
...Each has too large a stake, industrial, commercial and financial, in the other's prosperity to permit minor disagreements to destroy the general good...
...We find America's good offices being used to promote a settlement between the government and Church in Mexico...
...We find the League Council and the nation which made the pact a reality eagerly moving to prevent trouble between Paraguay and Bolivia...
...In effect, the Gael found a way of life long ago, and a religious faith, that satisfied him then and forever, and seemed to offer all that a man can wring from the world...
...On the other hand, the American isolationists have not hesitated to point out that in such a merger as has been indicated to us, the new world would contribute the assets and the old world the liabilities...
...Propagandists are very apt, in considering these factors, to fail to take into account the fact that Europe is our best customer, that we have loaned billions of dollars to European governments and enterprises, and that we have hundreds of millions tied up in those same industries, shipping companies, oil and rubber companies with which "we" are competing...
...At one time a war between Japan and America for the control of the far East was earnestly discussed...
...Ireland shows to us their living makers, and tells us something of what they did and how they thought...
...The new relationship which is being created is one of dynamic multiplicity...
...Should the Young plan be revised in the future, the question of war debts will again bob up...
...On the one hand, the articulately Eurocentric element in both worlds has insisted that a plus sign should express the relations of the old and the new world...
...Granted that they are irritating as obstacles to trade, they are by no means as irritating as was, say, the pagan nudity of the African natives to the cotton manufacturers of England...
...far from it...
...For the last ten years we have heard--and perhaps secretly sympathized with--the growing volume of complaint against the manners, appearance, vulgarity and nouveau-richness of our tourists...
...Parties which gather on the Irish moors for hunting, shooting and fishing, and render a great horse show the chief function of the Irish social year, maintain a tradition which, I,ooo years ago, created in the hunting tales and poems of the Fiana the world's first large sporting literature...
...To go a little further afield, the election of President Hoover was regarded by August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 4r9 some as an anti-Catholic victory...
...The image or record of the Irish past thus arrayed possesses worth and fascination for the learned world...
...The German Customs Union seemed at the time injurious to British interests, but actually it led to an immense increase in Anglo-German trade...
...The fact is that on many points the interests of the old and the new world are entirely compatible with plus Europe or the century of Europe minus America...
...His literature, therefore, contrasts in a remarkable way with that of such a country as England, where the writings of every generation mirror some philosophic change...
...ugust 28, r929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 4r7 AMERICA "X" EUROPE By JOHN CARTER OR the last ten years, in the mathematics of world economy discussion has been dominated by the most elemental of conceptions...
...Nor is it immune from qualification...
...Should the British system of imperial preference be expanded as a result of the agitation set in motion in London and the dominion capitals by our tariff revision, the consequent increase in imperial prosperity could not fail to be reflected in an upward surge in our trade with the empire...
...We find Mr...
...the outbursts may be even more bitter, since they will be able to borrow the habiliments of patriotism...
...Anglo-American naval conversations may get tangled up with the current domestic politics of continental nations...
...Working by the old dead reckoning of "plus" and "minus" psychology it is easy to make out a red-hot case for trouble...
...The old and later sagas, apart from their historical content, are as bold and as satisfying as those of the Northmen, as rich in color as the tales of Greece...
...Great Britain has been grousing about our duties ever since the Civil War, yet our purchases from the British have shown a steady increase during the same period...
...After a ten-years' scramble for oil, the world's oil companies found themselves so threatened with over-production and low prices that, as a result, the "oil war" has been called off and we find the companies agreeing to a general program of restricted output, our Dutch "competitors" admitting American companies to their oil fields, and the Dutch Skell embarking on an ambitious selling campaign in New York and New England...
...From the practical point of view, it is far more to the interest of America and Europe to co6perate economically than it is to their interest to distrust or boycott each other...
...Always Gaelic literature belongs to the open air...
...THE GLORIES OF GAELIC By AODH DE BLACAM F THE literature written in Gaelic during fourteen centuries, much has been lost...
...After a decade of talk on the perils to Europe of Americanization, of the subtle threat to European culture, of the deadly blight on Europe's "soul" represented by American methods, we find that Europe welcomes and adopts an American plank denouncing government ownership and favoring private ownership at the recent International Chamber of Commerce meeting of Amsterdam...
...Nothing is sure in the realm of politics, and still less is anything sure in the realm of economics...
...As it is, however, the prospects are that the old world and the new, whatever their political relationship, will continue on the best of economic terms...
...It would be idle to expect the two continents to agree on every point...
...political maneuvers meet at yiven points...
...Capital investments interlock...
...R. A. S. Macalister writes: Nowhere else but in Ireland do we find a literature that comes down to us right out of the heart of the La T~ne period...
...But if politics is the science of the possible, economics is the science of the practicable...
...America multiplied by Europe, especially in terms of the unpredictable quantities of world trade, implies neither European accretion nor European impoverishment, neither domination nor subjection, but the plain advantage of both worlds in their mutual relationships...
...While the tourist makes himself odious, he spends money--to the yreat edification of his hosts...
...War may come in the far East, despite all efforts to avert it...
...One of the most remarkable traits of Gaelic literature is that it deals, so to speak, with a continuous historic present...
...We compete with Europe industrially, financially, in shipping, in commerce, and for the control of raw materials...
...Unless America and Europe merged their assets and their liabilities on a fifty-fifty basis, there would be no hope for mankind...
...Alarmists can--and do--point to current "anti-American" commercial propaganda, to agitation for the cancellation of war debts, to proposals to devalorize gold or to boycott the American dollar, to ambitious schemes for establishing "a solid economic front" in Europe against our "financial and industrial coionization," to the efforts to form a single customs union out of the British empire as a "reaction against the American tariff," and to the countless pinpricks and exasperations inseparable from the position of economic preeminence which we now enjoy and from which determined and entirely natural efforts are being made to displace us...
...America plus Europe, America minus Europe, are arbitrary mechanical conceptions on which it is possible to base prejudice and arouse political passion...
...We have been lending billions to Europe and there has been talk of an "invasion...
...We find Dawes and MacDonald amicably settling all outstanding naval issues...
...They have "spoiled" Europe--and they spend there two and a half times the sum Europe pays us on account of the war debts...
...The result of their co6peration will be neither the enslavement of Europe nor the subordination of America that the political mathematicians profess to fear, but the multiplication of each other's resources in the mysterious and fruitful manner symbolized by the letter "x...
...Such an enumeration is not exhaustive...
...In the older portion is found a window into the early Iron Age, wherein European civilization was founded...
...The trouble is that too much is too easily made of our mutual divergences...
...High wages in Europe may provoke outbursts on the part of European manufacturers as bitter as those which heralded our own employers' reaction to Ford's first announcement of a minimum wage scale at Detroit...
...Our tourists may again arouse the resentment of the "toured...
...each other, that co6peration between them is necessary and increasingly practical in many lines of human endeavor, and that if we are ever to arrive at a sane evaluation of our proper economic relationship to Europe, we must consider the points at which our interests coincide as well as those at which they diverge...
...When we rule out what is repetitious and what is dull, a classic residue remains that would fill, perhaps, from five hundred to a thousand printed volumes...
...At one time a war between England and America for the control of the seas was a subject of conversation...
...Even the threats of forming a European customs union leave us undisturbed, for the very good reason that whatever is calculated to enhance European prosperity cannot fail to make us more prosperous...
...This is not to say that American and European interests are identical...
...They are possibly odious--and they disperse abroad a sum which is almost exactly equal to the sum earned by all of our $I5,OOO,OOO,OOO worth of foreign investments...
...Europeans have today $7,ooo,ooo,ooo invested in American enterprise, a sum considerably larger than our own direct stake on the continent...
...he is equally struck by the persistence of the heroic air in the latest tales and poems...
...It is, moreover, the image of civilization half heroic, half pastoral, that continues down to the present day...
...We find Henry Ford enlisting the co6peration of the International Labor Bureau at Geneva in order to discover "real wages," so that the Ford factories in Europe may pay their workmen the equivalent of the Detroit scale...
...x" is the most appropriate symbol for the real relationship between the western hemisphere and the continent from which are derived its racial stock, its civilization and its political evolution...
...Ireland still is little troubled by the perplexities of the study...
...Relations between the two countries hinye upon new and therefore unknown quantities...
...In sport, the Gaelic habit still lives among us...
...American stockholders are being deprived of voting rights in certain British companies...
...Punitive tariffs on certain types of American goods, quotas on American motion pictures and reprisals on American trade may temporarily obscure the essential harmony of world economics...
...After mulling over the debt and reparations questions for a decade and exhausting the possibilities of polemics in every known tongue, including the Scandinavian, we find that the French government is ratifying the debt agreements, that the Young plan is winning German support for an orderly and non-political retirement of the German reparation obligation, and that our capital and support are being solicited for a world bank to handle international settlements and to finance the development of Africa through reparation payments...
...In the case of Europe and America, economics is rapidly surmounting the seemingly impassable barriers of mutual suspicion and resentment left by the war...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
