How Europe Has Built Up Its Huge Share Of The World's Trade

On the other hand, the most God-forsaken regions of the other continents will erect themselves into wealthy States on the basis of the luxuries with which they feed the ostentation and vanities of the European rich - in one geographical division, sunburnt ostrich farms, or gold and diamond mines in barren ravines or dried-up water-courses and rocky hillsides, in another snow-covered wastes and the fur-yielding animals that roam over them. And the consequence is, that when objects of imaginative desire and luxury are pitted for exchange against mere bodily necessities, the nations that own the former, and the machinery which turns them out, as well as the nations that have a monopoly of the luxuries of the rich, will take the cream in every bargain between themselves and the nations that produce the mere gross raw materials which minister only to the bodily necessities of life. And it is because Europeans have all along supplied the world with the artificial products which minister to the imaginations of men, rather than with the food or fruit necessary for bodily sustenance, that they have got the best of the bargain in every exchange; and so have been enabled to accumulate that preponderating share in the capital, wealth, and trade of the world on which Mr. Schooling dwells.

Trade Changes Of The World From Mediaeval Times

In the Middle Ages, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and the other great trading cities of Italy, got it by being the middlemen through whose hands the produce both of the East and West had to pass before it could find its customers; and so were able to retain the lion's share of the profits for themselves. In later times, the European nations in turn - Spain, Portugal, Holland, and England - exploited the wealth of the East and West on their own account; and by their swords made themselves not only the distributing middlemen, but the owners as well of a great part of the lands of the East; thus still further adding to the capital, wealth, credit, and trade, of Europe as against the rest of the world. In the present day, the exploiting of the Eastern and Southern nations by the Western and Northern is no longer mainly done in their capacity as middlemen taking toll, nor yet as conquerors by expropriation, but chiefly by loaning them the capital back again which their trading positions and swords had been the means originally of extracting from them. Now, while Europe acted as middleman and took toll from the East, the East always got something in return; and when she acted as conqueror, and expropriated the wealth of the East, the latter got little or nothing in return; but now that she is acting as capital-supplier mainly, what is likely to be the result?

The Trade Future Of The East

This is the question, bearing on Mr. Lowen-feld's scheme, to which I have all along been leading up. And the first thing that occurs to one is that in being freely supplied by European capital, the Eastern countries are gradually being equipped on their own soil with all the machinery and processes for the production, transmission, and distribution of all the wealth of which they are capable; and that although at first most of the profits of these concerns go to the European, still, with the instruments of production planted on their own soils, it needs must be that sufficient of this wealth created in their midst must in time filter through to themselves; and so in the end enable them to pay off their indebtedness, and own their railways, machinery, and plant themselves - precisely as happened with the United States of America under similar circumstances. And what this means in plain English is simply this - that as the rest of the world is richer in the natural instruments of wealth than Europe - in corn- and fruit-lands, in mines, etc., and in no long time will either own the artificial instruments of production in the shape of machinery and processes necessary to extract this wealth, or will have been taught how to make these instruments themselves, it is evident that in a comparatively few years, at the rate at which things are now going, Europe and the rest of the world will change places in the relative amount of trade and wealth-production with which they are credited by Mr. Schooling; and that instead of Europe doing two-thirds of the trade of the world and the rest of the world one-third, she will more likely do only the one-third while the rest of the world takes the two-thirds.

Europe's Prospects Of Declining Trade. Geographical Distribution Of Capital And Movement Of Trade

Now, Mr. Lowenfeld has in his scheme of the Geographical Distribution of Capital provided for its keeping step with this steady movement of the balance of trade from Europe and the West to the South and East, by confining his investment list not only to such stocks in each division of the world as are of unexceptionable security, but by insisting that the permanency not only of any particular investment in its own geographical division, but that of any particular geographical division itself, shall be only relative - in the sense, that is to say, that it shall keep time, as it were, to this general movement of wealth and trade from West to East, and be altered and rearranged at intervals accordingly. But the fact that the evolution is so slow and its stages so well marked gives the periodical changes in his investment list - changes which are made neither at too long intervals nor at too short ones - a peculiar appropriateness, differing in this markedly from a Life Insurance Company, for example, which when it once takes a risk has to carry it through to the end, even were all its clients to die on the morrow.