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THE MORALS OF ECONOMIC INTERNATIONALISM

J. A. HOBSON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1920

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

BARBARA WEINSTOCK LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE

This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the University of California on the Weinstock foundation.

THE MORALS OF ECONOMIC INTERNATIONALISM

It ought not to be the case that there is one standard of morality for individuals in their relations with one another, a different and a slighter standard for corporations, and a third and still slighter standard for nations. For, after all, what are corporations but groupings of individuals for ends which in the last resort are personal ends? And what are nations but wider, closer, and more lasting unions of persons for the attainment of the end they have in common, i.e., the commonwealth. Yet we are well aware that the accepted and operative standards of morality differ widely in the three spheres of conduct. If a soul is imputed at all to a corporation, it is a leather soul, not easily penetrable to the probings of pity or compunction, and emitting much less of the milk of human kindness than do the separate souls of its directors and stockholders in their ordinary human relations. There is a sharp recognition of this inferior moral make-up of a corporation in the attitude of ordinary men and women, who, scrupulously honest in their dealings with one another, slide almost unconsciously to an altogether lower level in dealing with a railroad or insurance company. This attitude is due, no doubt, partly to a resentment of the oppressive power which great corporations are believed to exercise, evoking a desire "to get a bit of your own back"; partly to a feeling that any slight injury to, or even fraud perpetrated on, a corporation will be so distributed as to inflict no appreciable harm on any individual stockholder. But largely it is the result of a failure to envisage a corporation as a moral being at all, to whom one owes obligations. Corporations are in a sense moral monsters; we say they behave as such and we are disposed to treat them as such.

Here is the sharpest distinction between individual and national morality. There are certain deeds which a good and honorable man would not do even to save his life; there are no deeds, which it is admitted that a statesman, acting on behalf of his country, may not do to save that country. It is foolish to try to shirk this disconcerting admission. The Machiavellian doctrine of "reason of state" is, in the last resort, the accepted standard of national conduct. This does not signify that a nation and its government admit no obligation to fulfil their promises, or even voluntarily to perform good offices for other nations, but that there is always implied the reservation that the necessity, or, shall we say, the vital interests, of the nation override, cancel, and nullify all such obligations. And when "necessity" is stretched to cover any vital interest or urgent need, it is easy to recognize on what a slippery slope such international morality reposes.

International morality is impaired, however, not only by this feeble sense of mutual obligation, but by the still more injurious assumption of conflicting interests between nations. Nations are represented not merely as self-centered, independent moral systems, but as, in some degree, mutually repellent systems. This notion is partly the product of the false patriotic teaching of our schools and press, which seek to feed our sense of national unity more upon exclusive than inclusive sentiments. Nations are represented as rivals and competitors in some struggle for power, or greatness, or prestige, instead of as co?perators in the general advance of civilization. This presumption of opposing interests is, of course, more strongly marked in the presentation of commercial relations than in any other. Putting the issue roughly, but with substantial truth, the generally accepted image of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities, as, for instance, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, etc., are engaged in striving, each to win for itself, and at the expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited objective--the world market.

Now there are three fatal flaws in this image. First comes the false presentation of the United States, Britain, Germany, and other political beings in the capacity of trading firms. So far as world or international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that competition takes place, not between America, Britain, Germany, but between a number of separate American, British, German firms. The immediate interests of these firms are not directed along political lines. Generally speaking, the closer rivalry is between firms belonging to the same nation and conducting their business upon closely similar conditions. One Lancashire cotton exporter competes much more closely with other Lancashire exporters than he does with German, American, or Japanese exporters of similar goods. So it is everywhere, save in the exceptional times and circumstances in which governments themselves take over the regulation and conduct of foreign trade.

For certain purposes it is, no doubt, convenient to have balances and analyses of foreign trade presented separately, so as to show the volumes and values of different goods which pass from the members of one nation to those of another. But the imputation of political significance to these statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce.

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