F.—ECONOMICS, 159 
judgment is not so casy. Some change did come over our economic life, 
or certain parts of it, with the turn of the century ; our effortless supre- 
macy was challenged. Reasonable men may dispute, and since the 
decisive evidence has perished will probably dispute for ever, whether 
the unrest and uncertainty of the Edwardian age marked a passing 
episode destined but for the War to give place to a fresh stage of swiftly 
rising prosperity, or, on the other hand, recorded the first shock of 
permanent forces working to make life in these islands less easy and 
to set a term to material progress. 
After the War—for that phase, if indeed we have reached it, I doubt 
whether we may find much comfort in Napoleonic parallels. The 
Napoleonic wars were wars between Governments and armies rather 
than peoples; they did not bite deeply into economic life; they left it 
possible for the best contemporary fiction to show «a picture of English 
society in which the military figure chiefly as dancing partners.'* The 
war of 1914-18 was waged on millions of non-combatants, as much as 
on armies ; it is being continued in the same form to-day ; the economic 
structure of the world, battered out of shape by four years of open war, 
is still twisted by human passions. The lesson of compulsory self- 
sufficiency has been learnt too well; in all parts of the world, by new 
economic barriers, nations are endeavouring to safeguard, at the expense 
of their native and natural industries, the industries which were forced 
on them by the extremities of war. The world is poorer in resources 
by its lost years and ruined capital; of those diminished resources it 
makes worse use.** 
To sum up, for Europe and its races the underlying influences in 
economics were probably still favourable when the War began. But 
the war damage was great and we are not in sight of its end. Man 
for his present troubles has to accuse neither the niggardliness of Nature 
nor his own instinct of reproduction, but other instincts as primitive 
and, in excess, as fatal to Utopian dreams. He has to find the remedy 
elsewhere than in birth control. 
The Population Problem Remains. 
Let me add one word of warning before I finish. Such examination 
as I have been able to make of economic tendencies before the War 
yields no ground for alarm as to the immediate future of mankind, no 
justification for Malthusian panic. 
It has seemed important to emphasise this, so that false diagnosis 
should not lead to wrong remedies for the world’s sickness to-day. 
But the last thing I wish is to over-emphasise points of disagreement 
with Mr. Keynes. The limits of disagreement are really narrow. The 
phrases which I have criticised are incidental, not essential, to 
Mr. Keynes’ main argument as to the consequences of the War and 
the Peace. And whether Mr. Keynes was right, or, as I think, too 
4 Jane Austen’s first three novels were written during the Revolutionary 
Wars (1796 to 1798) ; her last three between Wagram (1809) and Waterloo (1815). 
The recent development of prohibitive tariffs is very fully described in a 
oe supplement by Dr. Gregory to the London and Cambridge Economic 
Service. b 
1923 - 
