THE WAR AND COMMERCE

AN ADDRESS BY HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER, M.P. Before the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, March 26, 1915

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,-I have, in a suggestive way, and without any very great detail, to make a few remarks with reference to the war which is at present raging, and commerce as it is affected by the war.

In the first place, I want to disclaim the idea that war is a promoter of commerce. To my mind, war has always been, is now, and always will be, not a promoter but an enemy of commerce, opposed to all its best interests, and affecting them in the long run in an adverse way, whatever may be said of incidental advantages for limited periods. After that disclaimer I wish to deny the German contention, put forward persistently now and for the past six or eight months, that they have been forced into this war because of Britain's jealousy of German progress in industry and commerce, and that the war was forced upon them by Great Britain for the purpose of destroying Germany's trade, and so getting rid of a hated and very strong rival in the realms of commerce. We are not disposed, after an experience of eight months, to put very much reliance on the statements put forward by the German government as excuses for their action in the war, or as causes of the war itself, and this statement is certainly as unfounded as any of their statements of causes or motives. If you will take the last thirty-five years, you will find that Great Britain has dealt in a particularly generous way with the commercial development of Germany. It is not on record that the British market, which is one of the most profitable of all Germany's markets, has ever been shut to Germany and its products. Britain has given a free market, a market of almost inestimable value, to German products during the last thirty-five years, and has given that market

on terms just as free, just as open, just as advantageous as to members of her own Empire, and to the people who live within the boundaries of Great Britain itself. That does not look very much like a jealous rivalry running to unreasonable lengths against Germany's commercial development. If you go outside Great Britain to her dependencies, and take the history of the Overseas Dominions, while it is true that the Dominions have given a preference to Great Britain in their markets, I can tell you from my knowledge of what has transpired with reference to Canada, and it is equally true with regard to the other Overseas Dominions, that this preference to Great Britain over German products has been given to Great Britain not because of one least little bit of an intimation that she would like to have it so, but has been given by these Overseas Dominions from their own initiative entirely. History does not record one single instance of a sphere of influence having been opened in China, in Africa, in any other part of the world, in which Britain has not stood for equal commercial rights in that sphere of influence, giving them to Germany just as freely and just as generously as she has given them to herself, claiming no more for herself than she has given to Germany. There is not a single instance on record of a German merchant ship in any quarter of the world having been hindered or hampered by the British fleet or by British governmental authority all these thirty-five years. Let these facts of themselves tend to reassure any of us who may have heard that argument used that there is nothing in it. The facts absolutely disprove it. Britain always plays fair. She is a sporting nation in this as in other respects, she likes to play the game, and she likes to play it with those that will contest the game with the greatest tenacity. If she wins she does not boast, and if she is beaten she is always ready to acknowledge that better men were against her in the contest. I do not think that the same can be said in respect to Germany in trade, in politics, or in war. In all these they are poor sports.

War is a spectacular thing, and whenever it occurs the attention of the world is riveted upon it. Commerce acts quietly. She makes her advance unobtrusively and peace

fully, but when we come to look at long-spaced distances in time and contrast them, there is no page in the whole history of the world which reads more like a romance than the page which records the birth, growth, and expansion and the exceedingly great development of commerce. Unless we actually space off a long distance of time and make the contrast between commerce then and commerce now, we do not get an adequate idea of what has been done.

Commerce, after all, depends absolutely upon production, and production in turn is stimulated by demand. Commerce is simply the carrying of articles to and fro, the interchange of products, one for another. Without production you can have no commerce. Demand comes in and applies its stimulus to productivity. The demand for what is necessary for the world to live, to be clothed, and to be warmed, is the primitive demand which first impels to production. But there is a wonderful deal of production which is stimulated outside of the demands of necessity, and which in turn makes demand all the greater by the abundance of supply. Beyond the necessaries of life, it is the rule that men buy according to their desires, and their desires are quickened by what they see of what is produced, and which they believe will contribute to their comfort, to their happiness, and to their upbuilding. So that to say that commerce is based upon production and demand, I think, puts us pretty surely upon the real foundations of commerce.

Now it is production which has been the really wonderful thing in this great world of ours, and commerce has grown only as production has grown. Back two or three or four thousand years ago, and how little of modern commerce was known. The productive areas were localised; exchange was restricted, there was no mechanism which served, so to speak, to mobilise the products of the world, produced as they were in the different and widely separated localities of the world. That mechanism is transportation. Three or four thousand years ago, transport was confined almost exclusively to the canoe pack, the man pack, and the animal pack, and with this limited capacity people bought and sold over limited areas. To-day look at the mechanism of transport. By sea the great flotillas of