Recovery--the Second Effort

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Century, $3.00]

WE are at last getting out of the era of amateurish books about the depression, filled with half-baked schemes and projects. Here is a professional speaking, who is determined to find the way out of depression. He is disturbed and puzzled by the fact that thirteen years after the war we seem to be back in an economic chaos as bad as that which immediately followed the conflict. He became director of the Economic Section when the League of Nations was organized and set going in 1919. For eleven years he remained in that position, and was intimately associated with every detail of reparations and of the constructive efforts at economic reorganization in the shattered European world. The utterances of a man of Sir Arthur’s capacity, who is master of a lucid style, has a vivid imagination, and is motivated by a high idealism, are of consequence to a world that is in serious need of sanity.

Where does he find the causes of this lapse into economic barbarism, with its attendant poverty, after five years of prosperity? For some periods during these years almost every nation in the civilized world has attained a standard of living for the common man higher than that which prevailed in 1913. As the author puts it, ‘we are, if we could but grapple with our fate, the most fortunate of the generations of men. In a single lifetime science has given us more power over nature, and extended further the range of vision of the exploring mind, than in all recorded history. Now, and now only, our material resources, technical knowledge, and industrial skill are enough to afford to every man of the world’s teeming population physical comfort, adequate leisure, and access to everything in our rich heritage of civilization that he has the personal quality to enjoy.’

He finds the cause for our poverty and disorganization in the fact that our specialized activities have outrun our capacity for regulative wisdom. We have allowed international competition, economic and political, to be conducted upon a plane which is too low. Raising the plane of competition of the international field is the problem which besets the world. The book might be described as an argument for doing just that.

Individual nations must delimit their selfish endeavors and aims in the interest of the general wellbeing. Such conduct as has characterized France and the United States in their acts which have led to the present maldistribution of gold must be eschewed. The Bank for International Settlements is a nucleus which might serve to raise the plane of international competition in this all-important sphere. The tariff policy of the world has returned to the laws of the jungle for its guide. When the world becomes truly civilized, economically speaking, it will look with amazement upon the madhouse which we have made of the marts of foreign trade. The network of international loans which exists to-day has been built up without guidance, often without skill, and sometimes without honesty. A burden of reparations has been imposed upon Germany on grounds which are neither economic nor reasonable. Everywhere the volume of international payments which must be made has grown; and simultaneously impediments to the movement of goods which alone can provide the funds for these payments have been set up in the form of tariffs. So, as Sir Arthur sees it, we are rapidly on the way to destroying foreign trade almost entirely — unless, that is, we have sense enough to act as reasonable beings and change all this to international coöperation.

In addition to these reforms in the economic field we must somehow or other guarantee the peace of the world. This is the last and greatest problem of the world; and without it all else will go for naught.

The detailed chapters which discuss the causes that have brought us to destruction and which set forth the

author’s proposed remedies are brilliant, colorful, and convincing. Even the briefest résumé of them would run into pages, so crowded are they with facts and suggestions. That they will long form the basis of discussion of this problem which is besetting the whole world, there can be no question. One rises from a reading of the book with a new and clarified vision of the things that have brought us to this state, and of the way along which hope lies.

DAVID FRIDAY