AFTER THE WAR

Otago Witness, Issue 3212, 6 October 1915, Page 74

AFTER THE WAR

AN AMERICAN ECONOMIST’S VIEW. A striking and unusual view of the war on its economic side was expressed by Mr Theodore H. Price, of New York, editor of Commerce and Finance, in the course of an interview reported in the New York World. We give the following extracts: — “ Hysterics is scarcely too strong a word to apply to the popular vision of a world made bankrupt for a generation by the war which is now raging in Europe. Unless wo are to abandon human experience as our safest guide, it may bo confidently asserted that general prosperity and not general poverty will follow the conclusion of peace, and that of this prosperity the present combatants will enjoy the greatest measure. “ The reason why a great war creates such a tremendous impression of ruin and disaster is that the suffering and destruction are concentrated into a narrow space and a brief period of time, and are thus, as it wore, dramatised before our eyes. “ Tho burning up of £50,000,000 ’ worth of property in the San Francisco fire was the subject of world-wide comment and sympathy, but from the £60,000,000 worth of property burned up every year in tho United States we get no big thrill. When tho Titanic sank with 1600 men, women, and children the whole of civilised humanity was shocked, yet we are not stirred to excitement by the deaths of 1600 men, women, and children a day in this country from preventive causes.

“So it is with the war. We hear the roar of the guns and the cries of the wounded; we see the unburiod dead lying amid the smoking ruins of a village, and our imaginations run wild. “ Thus out of the physical suffering, out of the mental torture, out of the loss of life, and out of the destruction of property which spell war we build up a theory of economic loss, of commercial depression, and of industrial stagnation altogether out of proportion to tho difference between the toll levied by death, disease, and disaster during times of war and that levied by the same agencies in times of peace. “Yet the general consequences which are likely to flow from the present conflict may be predicted within reasonable limits of accuracy cither by examining the records of past wars and talcing account of their results, or by looking at the broad facts of to-day in the light of cool common sense instead of in the heated blaze of our impassioned pity. “Of every war in modern times it has been said during tho progress of the hostilities that the misery of it would make it the last war, and that the expense of it would bankrupt the nations engaged and precipitate a general financial crisis throughout tho family of nations. Pacifist orators have always described war as a setting back by centuries of the march of civilisation, and professional economists have always spoken of losses which the lapse of a generation would not suffice to repair. “The annals of history may be searched in vain for any fulfilment of these prophecies and for any substantial warrant for these direful asseverations about the effects of wars. “The Napoleonic wars were followed almost immediately by an era of economic and social progress such a_s had never experienced before in so brief a period. During tho Crimean war the business activity of Prance and of England was not only unabated, but showed an expansion which was more than sustained after tho conclusion of peace. “ The Franco-Prussian war marks the date of Germany’s entrance upon a career of phenomenal commercial growth, and in France, notwithstanding the indemnity of five thousand million francs which, was exacted from her, so far from ? povcrty and distress appearing as consequences of her defeat, industrial recuperation was well under way before the Treaty of Frankfort was ratified. , “The Boor war, which cost England more than £200,000 000, ushered in a period of trade expansion which broke all previous records, and after the Spanish-American war the United States touched a high-water mark of prosperity which eclipsed everything within the nation’s experience.