NO MORE TRADE WARS

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10207, 18 February 1919, Page 7

NO MORE TRADE WARS

ECONOMIC WEAPON AS A WAR MEASURE. 'ln IS3B France and Italy engaged in a trade war. For two years each country applied retaliatory duties against the other, and then for eight years further each country applied its maximum duties to imports from the other. Both suffered' seriously. By tho end of the decade Italian exports to France had declined 57 per cent., and French exports to Italy showed a decrease of fully 50. per cent. More serious was tho trade war between Prance and Switzerland in the earfy ’nineties. Franco applied to Swiss goods her maximum rates, which were approximately 40 per cent, higher than her minimum rates. Switzerland in turn applied to French goods punitive duties ranging upward to 150 per cent. Tlie Swiss also, by changes in railway rates, assisted in diverting their Marseilles business to Genoa, their Havre and Dunkirk trade to Antwerp and Rotterdam, and the whole of their trans-Atlantic silk trade to England via. Belgium and Holland. In addition, they cancelled their literary convention with France, which meant not only a serious financial loss to her, but the diminishing of French cultural influence, to the advantage of German thought and literature.

France's losses in this trade war were heavy. The diversion of Swiss commerce to other countries lost to her millions of francs in railway receipts, ocean freights, and commissions. Austria, Italy, .and the United States gained at her expense in the sugar trade; Spain in the wine trad©; Italy in the silk trade; Germany and Belgium in metal goods; and the United States in leather. Germany received half of the trade lost by France in ready-made clothing and ono-third of that lost in woollen goods. Not until seven years after the close of the trade war did French exports to Switzerland equal again the exports of the normal years before the trade war. History is conclusively against trade wars. In so fax as the Paris resolutions and the plans for the economic union of Central Europe provide for the use of the economic weapons as a war measure, they are legitimate supplements to military operations. It is when they go beyond this and contemplate organised trade warfare after peace is declared that they become dangerous. The very conception of such plans has made it clear that the military struggle must go on to a point where all problems can he settled at the Peace Conference. They constitute a warning against an inconclusive peace. They lead to the, conviction that a permanent peace oan bo achieved only after a decision in the field. If w© can look forward only to a bitter trade conflict after hostilities cease, with the Allies on one side and the Central Empires on the other, we may expect that conflict to culminate in a second 'world war.—" William S. Culbertson, in the “Century Magazina.”