FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF WAR

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 25, Issue 3766, 8 June 1936, Page 7

FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF WAR

“CHAIN THE WAR GOD ! ”

DR. RULE’S BRILLIANT EXPOSITION

(By T. E. McMillan, Specially Written for the Courier)

“Chain the War God!” by Dr. Victor A. Rule.—James A. Bell, Coy., Elkhart, Indiana, U.S.A. Epoch-making will, this reviewer believes, prove no exaggeration as a term descriptive of this remarkable book, the interest of which is height-, ened for us here by the circumstance that the author is lute of Auckland and served in with the Anzacs under Allenby in Palestine. Dr. Rule, a son of the late Rev. Francis Rule of Christchurch, and who has several relatives in this Dominion, was also for .many years Leiutenant-Colonel in the 158th Infantry, Arizona Naional Guard, U.S.A., so he has no mean military service behind him. As an M.A., and a Doctor of both Philosophy and Divinity, he thus brings a wonderfully fine equipment of practical experience and ripe scholarship to bear upon the subject of which he gives us so brilliant so logical and so very readable an exposition. No reader need be afraid of meeting baffling technical arguments or descripitions in this simplyWritten, profoundly well-informed, and masterly analysis of the underlying causes of war: after reading this work, one could merely be bored by reading or listening to the speeeh*es delivered on Anzac Day here in New Zealand, and the many superficial resolutions passed by sundry organisations, moved by wel-lmeaning but insufficiently instructed intending social reformers, nearly all of whom mistake effects for RIVAL ARMAMENTS Surveying the history of armaments, the author shows how the firms interested in this manufacture were responsible, through their controlled press, to incite the people of England against France, and to force the, government of the day to go in for great expenditure, despite the opposition of Gladstone, who was opposed to it at all. In this connection, it is illuminating to compare what Richard Cobden the free trade champion said then (he. was an M.P. in 1847), about competition in armaments, and to compare this with what Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons a few weeks ago: “But the greatest evil connected with these rival armaments is that they destroy the strongest motives for peace. When two great neighbouring nations find themselves subject to war expenditure, without the compensation of its usual excitement and honours, the danger to be apprehended is that if an accident should occur to inflame their hostile passions—and we know how certain these accidents are at intervals to arise—their latent sense of suffering and injury may reconcile them to a rupture, as the only eventual ascape from an otherwise perpetual war taxation in time of peace.” Readers who follow the cable news will recollect that Churchill said the above was exactly the position Germany is now in—cannot stop war expenditure, having gone too far to retreat, and will, unless a miracle happens, be driven to war as the only other alternative, and that hopeless one too! PROFITS FROM ARMAMENTS Dr. Rule is not under the common delusion so frequently voiced on Anzac Day and other patriotic occasions, to the effect that the profits of armament-making are the bedrock cause of war. He knows their power, and how hideous it all is for he says: . “Of all humlan enterprise where profits are most questionable, most unethical, most corrupting of public and private conscience, and most consistently excessive, there is n,o business to compare with that of armament -making.” He goes on to show, however, that there is something which yields far more profits than all the armaments and all the trade of the world put together, and that' the private appropriation of this something, and the consequent investment abroad of the surplus wealth so obtained, and Which should be spent in its country of origin, is the real cause of Wars. We will deal with this specifically in the next paragraphs. SURPLUS WEALTH DANGER The author next quotes from “How Diplomats Make War, by the Hon. Francis Neilson, a British statesman, In 1909, when there wa.s a scare in England over German invasion, there was an excited demand for more dreadnoughts, four of which were already laid down. The catch-cry was, “We want eight, we won’t wait,” the Conservatives demanding thus a hundred per cent, increase. Lloyd George yielded to the clamour, and in his famous Budget of 1909 he outlined how the finance was to be secured. He told the “patriots” that he was going to collect tihe rent, the economic rent of land (a “tax” on land values, he miscalled it), and here is the result of that threat: “A cry of pain arose from landlords and plutocrats all over the land. One hundred German sixteen-inch guns could not have wrought half the panic among the ruling classes that this budget did. The cries of ‘invasion’ and ‘raid,’ and ‘another amendment to the German Naval Law,’ and (Dr. Rule interpolates) ‘we want eight and we won’t wait’, were turned into howls of ‘confiscation’, and ‘spoliation’, and ‘robbery’. All talk of wanting eight dreadnoughts was stilled and fears of a German invasion were lost in the horrors of having to place a value on land.” We may explain here that in England there is no land valuation such as we have in New Zealand. A former Earl of Derby (a great landlord), got a law passed to make such valuation, but when he saw the effect in operation, whereby the stunning truths of land monopoly would be made public, he quickly got the work stopped. Snowden proposed to do a similar thing, and had men actually on valuing, but the first administrative act of the National Government, with Ramsay Macdonald as Prime Minister, was to sweep away the

measure, taking the men off the valuation work and putting them into other parts of the British Civil Service. The Labour Government of England was really a camouflaged landlords' government, and the millions it spent on housing and public works enriched only the landlords and a few other parasites. The whole wretched history of it constitutes a grave warning to Labour in New Zealand, but this is a digression, in part. “THE BETTER ’OLE” Assuredly there was and is a tremendous profit in armament-making. This being so, and these plutocrats (including Dean Inge and other church dignitaries at one period), had extensive shareholdings in armament firms, so why did they forget the profits of this armament manufacture when their receipts from land rentals were threatened? The answer is, in the language of the immortal Baimsfather, that the ■huge profits from landlordry were and are easily, and beyond all comparison, “the better ’ole.” We will have a good authority upon the subject of where greatest permanent fortunes come from: Bear in mind that “real” estate means land (which includes coal, oil, etc.), the term deriving anciently from “royal” when all land was held to be the property of the Crown, held in trust for the people; actually so, not merely theoretically as we now have it, thus robbing the people of a natural birthright: “Ninety per cent, of all' millionaires become so through owning real estate. More money has been made in real estate than in all industrial investments combined.” —■ Andrew Carnegie. To be sure, libraries and other Carnegie foundations all over tlhe world show that Carnegie knew something about surplus wealth, and where it comes from mostly. ’Hie landlords of Britain were not going to have any war, against Germany or anyone else, if it meant that the game was to be paid for out of the social values of land. What they wanted was war paid for by taxation, so that they, through a colossal increase in National Debt, could invest their surplus wealth got from land values, and draw more interest tribute from the wealth-production of the people. “WITH” AND “FOR" For space reasons, one must conclude now as briefly as may be. Dr. Rule goes on to show that such resolutions as those proposed by several branches of the New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Associations, to the effect that in the event of war all excess profits be taken by the State are dealing merely with after-effects, and not with causes, and ©an at best have only partially deterrent effect. War profits are results, hectic and precarious, not to be compared with the parasitic tribute in perpetuity levied by the private ownership of land and the natural resources. The author gives ample evidence that the surplus wealth from land investments and ownership are sent abroad for further investment in land and natural resources mainly, especially in backward places like Morocco and various native territories. From these, through the products, particularly of mining, a stream of tribute comes back to the investors. Once this tribute is at all threatened, either by the natives seeking to possess their own lands, or by foreigners trying to get a share, then the first thing we know is that a warship is being sent to protect the “interests” of the nationals of this or that country. Were this individually unearned increment collected by the State in the first place, and used for public services, abolishing taxation, these huge and supremely dangerous accumulations of surplus money seeking outside investments would never occur, and the general level of real prosperity of each country would be so high that none would want or need to go to war. Here is Dr. Rule’s conclusions stated succinctly, and none who has studied our social problems from the threefold basis of history, ethics, and economics will gainsay him: “Let me repeat, the wars of modern nations arise from foreign investments. These foreign investments are made with surplus wealth. This surplus wealth arises primarily from the private appropriation of the socially-created values of lands and natural resources. These sociallycreated values can be socially expended when we abolish all taxation upon the things which are the results of human labour, and governments are made to live upon that which they themselves produce. “The power to have enduring peace is resident in the votes of the people of the world. We MUST chain the war-god. We MUST be done with the superficial and face the realities. Another conflict, such as the World War, or the STILL DEADLIER CATACLYSM TOWARDS WHICH WE ARE DRIFTING, and modem civilisation cannot hope to survive.” Every man and woman with a mind above that of a moron, and especially every social reformer, should read this book. The acceptance of its truths would banish not only war, but poverty amidst abundance, and all the futilities and frustrations that this state implies, from the face of the earth.