158 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
should) grow more corn and do less trade. The _ practical 
answer to that argument is that we are already too far from 
self-sufficiency to make worth while any attempt to return. Any 
change great enough to diminish seriously our dependence on overseas 
trade, in other words our exposure to the Austrian risk, would involve 
an impracticable reduction in our total population and our average 
wealth. A middle course that is sometimes suggested is to aim at 
self-sufficiency in the British Empire, by tariff arrangements favouring 
Imperial rather than foreign trade. The adoption of such arrangements 
clearly depends more on the wishes of the Dominions than on those of 
Britain, and their value for the purpose in view upon the readiness 
of the Dominions to acquiesce in a division of economic functions which 
would leave the most advanced and most profitable ones to the British 
Isles. It is more than doubtful whether this is the Dominion view of 
Imperial economics. In the last analysis, the long road which Britain 
has travelled to dependence on international trade, as general and as free 
as possible, will, I believe, be found to be irretraceable. Like the hero 
of one of Mr. Wells’ novels, the Britain that we know, the Britain , 
of forty millions, has been made for a peaceful and co-operative world ; 
she must try to create such a world if she does not find it ready to hand. 
Recapitulation. 
Let me try to gather together the threads of this long discussion. A 
further quotation from Mr. Keynes’ writings will serve for a starting- 
point :— 
‘The most interesting question in the world,’ he writes, ‘(of those 
at; least of which time will bring us an answer) is whether, after a 
short interval of recovery, material progress will be resumed, or 
whether, on the other hand, the magnificent episode of the nineteenth 
century is over. In aftempting to answer this question it is important 
not to exaggerate the direct effects of the late War. If the permanent 
underlying influences are favourable, the effects of the War will be no 
more lasting than were those of the wars of Napoleon. But if even 
before the War the underlying influences were becoming less favour- 
able, then the effects of the War may have been decisive in settling 
the date of the transition from progress to retrogression.’ }* 
The warning deserves attention. Yet, as I am less inclined than 
Mr. Keynes to be pessimistic about the tendencies before the War, I 
feel perhaps more pessimistic than he is in this passage about the effects 
of the War, and the possibly enduring damage it may have done and 
be destined to do to humanity. 
Before the War, as I have tried to show, there is nothing to suggest 
that Europe had reached its economic climax ; Malthus’ Devil, unchained 
again or not, cannot be found where Mr. Keynes professes to find him. 
For the world of white men as a whole there is even less ground for 
pessimism ; the limits of agricultural expansion are indefinitely far. If 
we regard only that part of this world which is known as Britain, 
18 « An Economist’s View of Population,’ in the Manchester Guardian Recon- 
struction Supplement, Section Six (1922). 
