The Psychology of Socialism
Book 4: The Conflict between Economic Necessities and the Aspirations of the
Socialists
Chapter 3: The Economic Struggles Between the Western Peoples
Gustave Le Bon
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I. The results of hereditary aptitudes in a nation:-The variety of the aptitudes which have helped the progress of nations at various periods of civilisation-The qualities which for a long time ensured the supremacy of the Latins -- The greater part of these qualities are now without outlet-In the present phase of the evolution of the world industrial and commercial aptitudes take a front rank-Why the slight industrial and commercial capacities of the Latins were sufficient formerly, but are not sufficient now. 2. The industrial and commercial situation of the Latin peoples: -- The results revealed by statistics-The indications given by our foreign consuls-Characteristic facts revealing the decadence of our industry and commerce-The apathy, indifference, horror of effort, and lack of initiative of our commercial men--Various examples-The invasion of the French market by German goods--The decadent state of our shipping-Our commercial relations with our colonies are established by strangers-The cost of our colonies, and what they bring us-The steady abatement of the quality of our products. 3. Causes of the industrial and commercial superiority of the Germans :-Slight influence of their military superiority over their industrial and commercial success-Technical instruction of the Germans-Their skill in taking the tastes of their customers into account-How they inform themselves of the requirements of their customers in various countries-Their sentiments of solidarity and association-The elements of their information.
I. THE RESULTS OF HEREDITARY APTITUDES IN A NATION.
I HAVE just shown how the economic necessities created by new circumstances have given rise to the very formidable competition of the peoples of the East, who from being consumers have become producers.
240) Gradually expelled from the Eastern markets, the peoples of the West are reduced to quarrelling over the European markets which remain open to them. What are the qualities which will snake for success in the struggles which every day become more severe ? Will Socialism give any advantage ? This we now propose to consider.
The aptitudes which have determined the superiority of races have not been the same in all periods of history. It is largely because a nation possesses certain aptitudes, but cannot possess all, that we see, in the course of the centuries, so many nations pass through all the stages of greatness and decadence, according as the conditions of the period render their characteristic qualities detrimental or valuable.
For a long time the progress of civilisation demanded certain special qualities : courage, a warlike spirit, a fine language, literary and artistic tastes, which the Latin nations possess in a high degree, and in consequence of which they were long at the head of civilisation. Today these qualities have far less value than of old, and it would even seem that some of them will soon have no more scope. Industrial and commercial aptitudes, which were formerly of secondary importance, are taking the first rank with the present phase of the world's evolution. It follows that the industrial and commercial nations are coming to the front. The centres of civilisation are about to be changed.
The consequences of these facts are very important. AS a nation is incapable of changing its aptitudes, it must strive thoroughly to realise -what they are, so as to utilise them in the best possible manner, and not to undertake futile struggles in regions where failure awaits them. A man who might snake an excellent musician, at brilliant artist, will make a sorry man of business, a very incapable manufacturer. For nations, as for individuals,
(241) the first condition of success in life is to know clearly of what one is capable, and to undertake no task too great for one's means.
Now the Latin nations, as the result of the hereditary conceptions of which I have pointed out the origin, possess only in a very small degree the aptitudes for commerce, industry, and colonisation which are to-day so necessary. They are warriors, tillers of the land, artists, inventors ; they are not manufacturers, business men, nor, above all, colonists.
Slight though the commercial, industrial, and colonising abilities of the Latin races may be, they were, nevertheless, sufficient at a time when there was little or no competition between the nations. To-day they are not sufficient. People are always speaking of the industrial and commercial decadence of our race. The assertion is not absolutely exact, since our industry and our commerce are far superior to what they were fifty years ago. One ought to say insufficient progress, not decadence. But the word decadence is perfectly just if we understand by that expression that the Latin nations, progressing far less rapidly than their rivals, will soon infallibly be supplanted by them.
The symptoms of this falling behind are clearly to be seen in all the Latin peoples, which proves that we are considering a racial phenomenon. Spain seems to have reached the last limit of this increasing inferiority, and it would seem that Italy must soon keep her company. France is still struggling, but the signs of her failure are becoming clearer every day.
2. THE INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL SITUATION OF THE LATIN PEOPLES.
In the following investigation we shall concern ourselves only with France ; for the other Latin peoples we
242) have only to repeat, with greater emphasis, that which applies to France. She is the least extinct of the Latin nations, but none the less her commercial and industrial situation is very far indeed from brilliant.
The facts which demonstrate our commercial and industrial weakness are to-day too evident to be contested. All the reports of our consuls or deputies who have been charged with the investigation of the question are unanimous, and repeat one another in almost the same words.
This is how M. d'Estournelles expresses himself in a recent publication :
" M. Charles Roux has given us a résumé of all the regrettable things observed in an already long experience, in a report on the decadence of our commerce. He might have written the same things of our navy or of our colonies. France compromises or neglects her resources through apathy, routine, and attachment to rules of thumb, of which a great number date from Colbert or Richelieu. Like all victims of apathy, she is energetic by fits and starts, and becomes heroic ; but she also has fits of madness, of sentimental reform, undertaken without forethought, and often worse than the evil they are destined to cure. When, for instance, she ceases to exploit her colonies, it is to assimilate them to the mother country from one day to the next, to make French departments of them, and to ruin them. Or she will suddenly decide, without a shadow of motive, and in spite of the natural and insurmountable difficulties in the way, that all the native Jews of Algeria shall be French electors, and consequently masters of the Arab population, and of our colonists themselves. Or, again, thanks to our ignorance she will ingenuously organise in the colonies a parody, a caricature of universal suffrage ; gives the right of voting on our Budget, and on matters
243) of peace and war, to the representatives of natives, Indian or Senegalese, who do not pay our taxes, do not serve in our army, and do not speak our language."
M. Depasse, in a judicious article, gives the causes of this state of things, which are almost identical with those I have already indicated :--
" France was not born a commercial nation ; she is an artist, a warrior, a revolutionary. It is her glory that she has an ideal raised far above the practical details of commerce, but as wars and revolutions are less and less in fashion she becomes less and less able to respond to the ideal of modern nations, and art itself is suffering profound modifications, since it has to address itself to mobs, and not only to an élite.
"All that for centuries has made the superiority of France has lost its value ; another civilisation is preparing itself, which will, we may be sure, have its own splendours ; but France would seem all the less disposed to enter into it with all her heart and all her genius, in that she has shone with a greater splendour and received more advantages and profit in the old civilisation of which she was the mistress. France is far advanced in the matter of political liberties; but politics also have lost their value ; she is falling back into the second rank in the estimation of the world and the requirements of the nations. France is lettered and eloquent ; it has been her character for two thousand years. But the eloquence of words is being supplanted by the eloquence of figures. Thus on every hand this phenomenon is presented for our consideration ; everything, or almost everything, that for long centuries made the power, originality, grace, and wealth of France, has lost its value in the world, and seems to have been cast out of the current of the order of things which is bearing modern humanity forward.
(244) This is perhaps a fact not unworthy of the attention of politicians."
"The German peril ! " writes M. Schwob, "well, that is just true ; but let us say also the British peril, the Australian peril, the American peril, and even the Russian peril and the Chinese peril. On the battlefield of modern industry and commerce there is neither peace nor alliance. Treaties are passed that are called commercial treaties, but these treaties themselves have for their object war without limit, without pity, more implacable than war at the cannon's mouth, and all the more perilous in that it victimises its millions without noise and without smoke.
"Thus our political alliance with Russia, and our reciprocal and unalterable friendship, do not prohibit commercial conventions which are, for the moment, entirely to the advantage of Germany, and to our hurt. In the regions of economics, in the present state of Europe and the world, there is no such thing as friendship. A heartless war is being waged on every side."
Our consuls, who witness abroad the steady and rapid decline of our commerce, make the same complaints, despite the reserve imposed on them by their official position. All give the same warnings, which, however, are quite futile. They reproach our manufacturers and commercial men for their apathy, their carelessness, their lack of initiative, their helplessness in changing old processes for new, and in adapting the formalities of every kind with which they surround the slightest actions to the new requirements of their customers ; in a word, they reproach them with their want of commercial intelligence.
Innumerable examples could be given. I will confine myself to the following, since they are highly typical :
Our manufacturers, and even the largest of them,"
(245) writes the correspondent of the Temps in the Transvaal, " are distrustful busybodies, unwilling to exert themselves, and cheerfully exchanging a lengthy correspondence on matters that their English or German competitors would settle in a few days.
"The English and German engineers have on the spot the current prices, in fullest detail, of every sort of machinery used in the mining industry, and when a tender or an estimate is invited they are able to deliver it within the short limit of five or seven days which is usually allowed. Our French engineers, who have not the same data, thanks to the inertia of their employers, have to abstain from competing, as the six weeks necessary for a messenger to reach and return from France render it impossible . . . . The English and Germans have complied with the demands which were made of them."
There are many analogous facts.
"A year ago," we read in the Journal "a merchant of South America wished to export some American lambskins to France and Germany. He was put in communication, for this purpose, thanks to the officious care of our consul and our minister of commerce, with one of our commission agents. The American merchant then despatched a consignment of twenty thousand skins to the French house, and, simultaneously, an equal consignment to a German house in Hamburg, with whom he had an understanding. A year went by; the two houses sent in the accounts of the sales. The French house had experienced so many difficulties in selling the merchandise, and was obliged to consent to such low prices, that the operation resulted in a loss of 10 per cent. on the part of the exporter. The German house, more active and more competent, had realised on the same goods a profit of 12 per cent. And the characteristic part of the affair is
(246) this : that it was in France precisely that it was able to place the goods. All commentary would be superfluous."
I have often been able to verify for myself the profound apathy, the horror of effort, and all the rest of the faults denoted by our foreign consuls. These faults, which are every day becoming more accentuated, appear still more striking when, after an interval of ten years, one renews acquaintance with the representatives of a formerly prosperous or semi-prosperous industry.
When I resumed some laboratory experiments with regard to invisible light rays, which I had put aside for several years, I was struck with the deep-rooted decadence both of the personnel and the plant of our manufacturers, a decadence of which I had nevertheless been informed from several quarters, and which, moreover, I had predicted in a chapter of my book Man and Society, published eighteen years ago. In one week several different firms refused to sell me certain instruments, representing a total value of more than £20 simply because the delivery would have caused a very slight inconvenience to the vendors. In the first case I had ordered an electric lamp. Before buying it I wrote to the maker to ask him if he would first let me see it working. As I did not even obtain a reply, I got one of his friends to inquire the reason of his silence. " It would be too much bother to sell under such conditions," he was told. In the second case I wanted a water-level to be fixed to a metallic part of a large apparatus. The dealer, although the director of one of the largest manufacturing photographic concerns in Paris, had not a single workman capable of executing the job: Thirdly, I wanted two supplementary contacts fitted to a galvanometer, a task which might require half an hour. The maker had the necessary workmen at
(247) hand : "but," he told me, " my partner would be displeased if I were to upset the staff for an order amounting to less than £8."
Not such are the methods of the German manufacturers. A short time after the preceding inconveniences, I was in need of a little laminated cobalt, which is not a particularly rare metal. I wrote to the principal manufacturing chemists in Paris. As the order was not an important one they did not even take the trouble to reply. One firm alone wrote to tell me that they could perhaps let me have the cobalt in the course of a few weeks. Having waited for three months, and being in urgent need of the metal, I wrote to a firm in Berlin. Although this time the order was only of a few francs, I received a reply by return of post, and the cobalt, worked up into the required dimensions, was delivered at the end of a week.
It is always the same with German firms. The most insignificant order is received with respect, and all modifications demanded by the purchaser are rapidly executed. The consequence is that German firms are springing up in Paris every day, and the public is obliged to have recourse to them, despite its patriotic reluctance. You go to one for an insignificant purchase, and soon you go nowhere else. I could mention several large official scientific establishments, which, on account of inconveniences such as I myself have experienced, have come to placing their orders almost exclusively in Germany.
The commercial incapacity of the Latins unhappily finds proof in every branch of industry. Compare, for example, the Swiss hotels, so attractive to the foreigner, with the wretched and inconvenient inns -,which we find in the most picturesque situations in France and Spain. After this comparison, how can we wonder that these
(248) places are so little visited? According to the official statistics, the receipts of the Swiss hotels .amount to £4,600,000, yielding their proprietors £1,240,000 profit, a truly enormous sum for a little country whose annual receipts hardly amount to £3,000,000. For the Swiss their hotels are veritable gold mines, rivalling the richest of Africa.
How much longer will it be," asks M. Georges Michel, who cites these figures in the Econoniiste Francais, "before our colonies, on which we have thrown away so many millions, will yield us a hundredth part of the amount that Switzerland, who has neither colonies, nor gold mines, nor silver mines, is able to levy on the stranger ? "
Young Frenchmen to-day are always being told to go as colonists to foreign countries. Would it not be far wiser and far more productive to counsel them to attempt, first of all, to colonise then- own country ? Since we do not know how to utilise the natural wealth under our hands, how can we hope to surmount the far greater difficulties which we should encounter in foreign countries ?
Our manufacturers and men of business are perfectly aware of all this, but their apathy is too great to permit of their being affected by it. I have had occasion to lecture several on the subject. I cannot remember to have convinced a single one of the necessity of adopting new methods. The one dream of one and all is to gain money without exertion, without risk, and without work.
" The French," writes one of the authors I have just quoted, "will be lucky henceforth if they are able to make a little holiest and sure profit, without speculation, and it they end, in good years and in bad years, in making the two ends meet, like Lafontaine's cobbler. But they will
(249) end by being unable to make them meet, the two ends of their very honest little thread. They must put away a little sum at once ; yes at once . . . And when this is put away it comes forth no more; this modest profit must not be risked in new ventures ! Above all, they will take good care not to renew their machinery, v, not to reform their methods of production. Don't speak to me of reforms ! They will go on thus as long as they are able, but that will not be for ever ; and the most competent of men, and the most moderate in their judgments, tell us that the end has come, or very nearly."
It has, in fact, come. We are living on the shadow of the past, on the shadow of a shadow, and ruin is approaching with a rapidity which amazes all the statisticians. Our exports, which, twenty years ago, were far greater than those of England, are now far less. As has justly been said, our commercial losses are such to-clay that we are paying every three or four years the war indemnity which we thought to have paid once for all.
The total ruin of our exterior commerce is saved by our monopoly of certain natural products, such as wines of superior quality, which almost alone of all others we possess, and the export trade in a few articles of luxury, such as fashions, silks, artificial flowers, perfumery, jewellery, and so forth, in respect of which our artistic ability is not yet extinct ; but in all else there is a rapid downfall
Our mercantile marine has naturally partaken of this decadence. It remains where it was, while all the other nations are increasing theirs in enormous proportions. Germany has almost doubled hers in ten years. England has increased hers by a third. \-Ve are gradually taping from the first rank to the last. While the tonnage of the port of Hamburg has increased tenfold in twenty-five
(250) years, the decadence of the ports of Havre and Marseilles is more evident every year. Strangers are trading for us on our own territory. Of the 16,000,000 tons French which represent our annual maritime commerce with other countries 4,000,000 tons are carried by French vessels, and the rest, that is to say, three-quarters, by foreign vessels. And, nevertheless, these foreign vessels touch none of the £440,000,000 subsidies which the Government is obliged to pay annually to our commercial marine to save it from the total ruin which its incapacity and lack of foresight would otherwise render inevitable.
Can we save ourselves by trading with our colonies ? Alas, no ! They refuse to accept ours, preferring English and German products. These colonies of ours, which cost us so many millions to conquer, are good for nothing but markets for the commercial houses of London, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, and so forth. Never have our traders understood that an Arab, a Chinese, a Kanaka, or a negro, may have different tastes from a Frenchman. This inability to represent to oneself ideas other than one's own is, as I have already shown, altogether characteristic of the Latins.
We are unable to establish a trade even with those colonies that are at our doors. One of our journals recently published the following reflections on the commercial relations of France and the Régence of Tunis :--
Sugars come from England, Austria, and Germany; alcohol from Austria; spun cotton chiefly from England, and to a smaller extent from Austria ; cotton, flaxen, hempen, and woollen fabrics from England ; silken fabrics from India and from Germany ; shirts from England and Austria; is ; wood from America ; candles from England and Holland; papers front England and Austria ; cutlery from England ; glass from Austria ;
(251) bottles front England ; clocks and watches from Germany or Switzerland; toys from Germany ; chemical products from England ; petroleum from Russia . . .
" And from France? From France there come always soldiers and officials."
And, nevertheless, they cost us terribly dear in men and in money, our too useless colonies. In his report on the Budget for 1897, M. Siegfried, a deputy, has justly called attention to the fact that all the English colonies, with their superficies of 15,000,000 square miles and their 393,000,000 inhabitants, cost the metropolis only £2,480,000, while ours, with less than 3,000,000 square miles of superficies and 32,000,000 inhabitants, cost us £2,960,000. Now, although far less populated and far less in extent than the English colonies, they cost more than the latter. Moreover, it is not for the glory of possessing these colonies that the English pay their money. These two and a half millions are merely an advance which is paid over and over again by the commerce of the colonies with the metropolis. The sole products which the Latins have hitherto exported to their colonies are huge battalions of officials, and a small quantity of a few articles of luxury, which are almost exclusively consumed by these officials themselves. The definitive Budget of our colonies is very lucid. They cost us £2,960,000 annually and bring us in about £280,000 Here is an absolutely deplorable operation, which is accomplished to the great stupefaction of the nations which watch us persist in the practice. Supposing that these colonies were ruled by colonising countries such as England or Holland, it is certain that matters would be reversed. They would cost the mother country £280,000, and bring her in £3,000,000 ; besides which they would quickly he covered, like all the English colonies, with telegraphs and railways due to
(252) private enterprise, and costing the metropolis nothing. We know that the network of 30,000 miles of railways with which India is covered has not cost the English Government a penny.
To the many causes of our national decadence we must unhappily add the unscrupulous procedure of many of our commercial houses, procedures that those who have travelled abroad know only too well. I remember that when I was in the East I was struck by seeing on all the bottles of Bordeaux and cognac a little label in English, indicating that the bottle had been filled by a London house, which guaranteed the purity of the product. On inquiry I learned that the great houses of Bordeaux and Cognac had for a long time sold liquors of such inferior quality to the English merchants established abroad that the latter had entirely abandoned the practice of applying to them directly, preferring to obtain their goods through English houses buying the liquors on the spot. This fact will not surprise those who are informed of the value of the articles that our merchants qualify as articles for exportation.
This decline in quality of our products is to be observed not only in those which are destined for exportation, but is more and more affecting those which are sold at home, a fact which explains the crushing success of foreign competition. Let us take a sufficiently definite example ; for instance, photographic objectives, which to-day form a by no means inconsiderable item of commerce. Any photographer will tell you that the English, and especially the German objective, although two or three times as expensive as the French article, has almost entirely driven the latter from the market. And why ? Simply because the foreign lenses of makers of repute are without exception good, and ours are only good exceptionally. The foreign maker, under-
(253) -standing that it is in his interest not to depreciate his name, does not put failures on the market. The French maker has not yet arrived at such a lofty conception. All that he has made, whether good or bad, must be got rid of, until finally he gets rid of nothing at all.[1] The same is true of a host of products ; photographic plates, for example. Take the best French brands, and in every box you will invariably find one or two bad plates, coated with unsuccessful emulsions, which the maker has slipped in among the good batches, being unable to resign himself to rejecting them. There is nothing of the kind with foreign plates. The English or German maker, possibly, is not more honest than the French maker, but he is far more intelligent in understanding what his interests are. The inevitable conclusion is that in a few years, despite all the protective tariffs imaginable, despite all the outcries of our makers, and by the mere force of things, the foreign plate will supplant the French plate just as the foreign objective has supplanted the French objective.
The relaxed honesty of our merchants is a very serious symptom, and one, unhappily, which is to be observed in every industry, and is on the increase. It is quite in vain that measures upon measures are passed to put a check on fraud in all the branches of commerce. In Paris, for example, the police have almost given up seizing fuel sold in sacks which are sealed with a pretended guarantee of weight. Invariably the weight is 25 per cent. less than that indicated, and the courts would not be sufficient to condemn all the offenders. In one
(254) case a delivery of 26 tons of coal was over 6 tons short The employés of the large dealer who committed the fraud must have known that such things were a daily practice. In other similar affairs it was proved that the merchant used to steal a quarter of the coal delivered, and the carters another quarter.
And, unhappily, such practices are becoming more and more general, even in the transactions of educated men. In a report published in the Officiel for December 23, 1896, summing up the analyses made by the municipal laboratory over a period of three years of products procured from the chemists' shops, the writer says, " that the proportion of products or preparations above all reproach amounts hardly to one-fourth."
3. CAUSES OF THE COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL SUPERIORITY OF THE GERMANS.
The industrial and commercial superiority of the English, and more especially of the Germans, is so evident to-day that it would be puerile to seek to deny it. And the Germans know perfectly well what to make of this point. This is how one ,of their writers expresses himself in a recent publication : --
"Nowadays it is we who export to Paris the Parisian article ! How the times are changed ! And how our parts are changed ! . . .
" For excavations, for road-work, for hard and illpaid callings, France must have Italians. For manufactures, for banking, for commerce in general, she must have Germans, Belgians, or Swiss . . . .
" The French workmen out of work are to be numbered by tens Of thousands ; and yet, and this is n very significant fact, the German who goes to Paris does not have to keep his hands in his pockets long. How many
(255) have we not seen set out for France ! and all, without exception, have found work there.
"Among our neighbours to send a son abroad is the height of luxury, which only a few rich families allow themselves. How many French employés will you find in Germany, or in England ? How many with no other means of subsistence than their salary ? For Germany the list is soon reckoned up-perhaps there are a dozen.
" Every year France makes way for such and such a nation in the matter of such and such an article. From the third rank she falls back to the fourth, from the fourth to the fifth, without ever regaining her lost ground. The table of the various exports of the whole world for the last ten years presents a striking spectacle ; it is like watching a race in which France, exhausted and ill-mounted, is letting, one by one, all her competitors outstrip her . . . .
" When a growing nation begins to elbow a more sparsely populated nation, which consequently forms a centre of depression, a current of air is set up, which is vulgarly called an invasion, during which phenomenon the civil code is laid aide . . . . The sparsely peopled nations must pull in their elbows." [2]
Referring to this writer N1. Arthur Maillet says : --
"This German has written phrases which continually haunt my mind. He has predicted that France will become a species of colony, which will be administered
(256) by French functionaries and supported by German manufacturers, merchants, and agriculturists. The first time I read this prediction, some three or four years ago, it seemed to me a mere insult. But on looking into the matter I was able to see that it was already more than three parts realised. If you doubt that it is so, ask those who are experienced in these matters what would become of the French industries and of French commerce if all foreigners were suddenly obliged to leave France. How many new companies are formed of which they are not the promoters, and of which they do not hold all the shares ? "
Let us try to discover the causes which have given the Germans such an industrial and commercial superiority in less than twenty-five years.
We will first of all set aside the reason, so often given, that their commercial success is facilitated by the prestige of their victories. This prestige has absolutely nothing to do with the matter. The fact is that the buyer is interested solely in the merchandise which is delivered to him, and nothing at all about the nationality of the vendor. Commerce is an individual, not a national matter. All nations are equally free to trade with the English colonies, and if the natives and colonists have long preferred English goods it is because they are better, cheaper, and more to their taste. If they are now beginning to prefer German goods it is evidently because the latter appear to have greater advantages. If then German commerce is steadily invading the world, it is not because the Germans have a large army, but simply because buyers prefer German merchandise. Military successes have nothing to do with this preference. The most that can be said of the influence of the German military system is that the young man who has been subjected to it has acquired habits of order, punctuality,
(257) duty, and discipline which will be of great value to him later on in commerce.
This first reason being eliminated, we must seek for others.
In the first rank, as always, appear racial characteristics. But before insisting on these we must first of all remark that the power of the Germans consists not only in their own proper strength, but also in our weakness.
When treating of the formative conceptions of the Latin mind, I denoted the causes of this weakness. My readers know how the aptitudes of the Latin peoples have been created by their past, and to what extent these peoples are to-day suffering from the effects of that past. They know what has been the result of our long-continued centralisation, of our progressive State absorption, which destroys all individual enterprise, and leaves the citizen incapable of doing anything for himself when he is deprived of guidance. They are familiar also with the terrible effect of a system of education which despoils the growing mind of the few vestiges of independence and will which have been left it by heredity, casts them into the midst of life without any knowledge other than words, and perverts their judgment for ever.
And to show to what extent the strength of the Germans consists in our own weakness, it will suffice to point out the fact that it is precisely our manufacturers and our merchants and our shopkeepers who are the pioneers of German products in France. This escapes the statistician, but it reveals a state of mind which I believe to be far more serious than the apathy, the suspicious and petty dispositions, and the lack of initiative with which our consuls reproach our commercial men. Not only are they steadily renouncing all effort and all idea of opposition, but they have begun to furnish our rivals
(258) with arms, by selling more and more exclusively the products of those rivals. In many industries we find that our some-time manufacturers have become simple commission agents, confining themselves to selling, at a large profit, articles which they have imported from Germany, and on which they have put their own names. It is thus that in less than twenty years the industries in which France was formerly in the first rank, such as the manufacture of photographic apparatus, chemical products, instruments of precision, and even articles de Paris, have passed almost entirely into the hands of foreigners. To get the simplest scientific instrument made in Paris is to-day a matter of considerable difficulty. The difficulty will be insurmountable when the few old makers who are still alive have disappeared.
Evidently it appears far simpler to sell a made article than to make it oneself. It is perhaps a less simple matter to foresee the consequences of this operation. Yet they are sufficiently obvious.
The German maker, who delivers to his Parisian competitor an article which the latter is the reputed maker, and on which he often realises a considerable profit, presently sees that it is to his advantage to sell the same article directly to the Parisian public in his own name. He commences first of all by selling, to several commission agents, the same article, but with his name engraved on it. This makes it impossible for the Frenchman to sell it under his own name, and at the same time suppresses his profit. Encouraged by his success, the German maker presently decides to open a shop in Paris, at which his manufactures shall be sold under his own name.[3]
(259)
Unhappily the manufactures of photographic necessities, instruments of precision, and chemical products are not the only ones that have passed into foreign hands. The articles de Paris sold by our great tailors and dressmakers are more and more German. Stuffs for men's clothes come in increasing proportions from England and Germany, and are more and more frequently made up by foreign tailors, who are now setting up their shops in every quarter of Paris. Foreigners are setting up in Paris as booksellers, art dealers, jewellers, and so on, and are now beginning to undertake trade in silks and ladies' clothing. If the jury had advised the elimination from the forthcoming Exhibition of 1900 all articles of foreign origin sold under a French name, our part in the Exhibition would have been a very poor one.[4]
It would, perhaps, be unjust to throw too many stones at our manufacturers, and to attribute exclusively to their incapacity and idleness what is in some part the effect of other causes. It is, indeed, very evident that the increasing demands of the workers, which are favoured by the bounty of the public authorities, together with the enormous taxes which are crushing our industries, contribute as much as the imperfection and insufficiency of our tools and the increase in the cost of production to the impossibility of struggling against
(260) our competitors. It is easy to understand that the manufacturer, harassed and annoyed, should finish by giving up the manufacture of articles that he can buy cheaper than he can make. He accordingly closes his workshop and descends to the rôle of simple retailer. If he had different hereditary aptitudes he would doubtless do as his English and American brothers, who are also affected by the demands of their workers and by competition, but who, thanks to their energy, and the daily increasing perfection of their plant, are able to compete without too great disadvantage with their German rivals. Unfortunately for our manufacturers, they have none of the qualities which make for success in such a conflict. At the bottom of all our social questions lies always this dominant question of race, which is indeed the supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations. All the facts enumerated in this chapter are contemporary, but how remote are their causes !
The system of centralisation to which the Germans have been subjected for some time past will one day, doubtless, as I have elsewhere remarked, conduct them to the pass in which we find ourselves to-day ; but in the meantime they are benefiting by qualities created by their past, qualities which, though not brilliant, are solid, and are in entire agreement with the new conditions and new necessities created by the evolution of the sciences, industry, and commerce.
What has been said in the preceding paragraph of their industrial and commercial success will already enable us to foresee the causes of this success. We shall understand them still better by considering their national qualities, and what they gain by them.
The principal qualities of the Germans are patience, perseverance, the habits of observation and reflection, and a great aptitude for co-operation. All these qualities
(261) are very highly developed by a marvellous technical education.[5]
These are the most general and at once the most fundamental causes of their success. Commercially and industrially they result in the constant perfection of industrial implements and products,[6] the manufacture of goods in accordance with the taste of the customer, and constant modifications according to his requirements, extreme punctuality in delivery, and the sending out into the entire world of intelligent representatives acquainted with the language and the customs of the various countries they visit, and the means and cost of carriage. A number of commercial societies constantly furnish their associates, by means of numerous agents sent to all quarters of the globe, with the most precise information. The Export Verein of Dresden spent between 1885 and 1895 nearly £20,000 in sending out travelling correspondents. The German Colonial Society possesses an annual revenue of £4,800, furnished by the subscriptions of its members, and has 1,051 representatives
(262) abroad. The union of commercial employés which has its headquarters at Hamburg, has 42,000 members, and places a thousand employés a year.
Most of the merchandise destined for exportation leaves by the port of Hamburg, whose commerce has increased tenfold since 1871, and which now surpasses Liverpool in the matter of tonnage, while Havre and Marseilles are declining from year to year. In Hamburg there are numbers of export agents who represent the interests of the manufacturers, and put them in relation with buyers. They have in their warehouses samples of every kind of goods, of which the form and nature are incessantly being modified by the makers, in accordance with information received from the most distant quarters of the globe.
The results obtained by these associations are prompt and valuable. In a report for 1894 an American consul, Mr. Monaghan, gave as an example the business done in Bosnia by the Sofia branch of one of the societies I have been speaking of. After taking the trouble to get up a catalogue in Bulgarian, and sending out nearly 200,000 letters or prospectuses, besides spending nearly 04,000 on commercial travellers, it received orders, after the first year, to the amount of £400,000, and at the same time immensely reduced the trade of all its competitors.
Such results cannot be obtained without trouble ; but the German never shrinks from exertion. Unlike the French manufacturer, he studies with the greatest care the tastes, habits, manners, and, in a word, the psychology of his clients, and the information published annually by the societies I have mentioned contains the most precise information on these subjects. M. Delines, reviewing a report of Professor Yanjoul, has shown how minutely the German investigators study the psychology of the nations with whom their merchants are about to do business. Speaking of the Russians, for example, the German indi-
(263) -cates their tastes, speaks of the necessity of taking tea with them before discussing business, then mentions the goods it is possible to sell them, and specifies the most useful of these, from a commercial point of view, with the words " sale absolutely good." In the Extort-Hand-Addressbuch, which is in the hands of every German merchant, we find characteristic notes of the following kind.
"The Chinese usually prepare their food in very thin iron utensils ; the rice is quickly cooked, but the saucepan is soon burnt and has to be frequently renewed. An English house, wishing to beat all its competitors, sent out a consignment of iron pots which were thicker, more durable, and were sold at a lower price. The Chinese at first took the bait, and the pots began to sell like wildfire. But this did not last long. At the end of a few days the sale suddenly stopped. The reason was a logical one ; fuel is very dear in China, the English saucepans were very thick, the rice cooked very slowly, and, in short, the new pots turned out to be far less economical than the old ones, in which the rice was cooked in no time. The Chinese returned to their accustomed and more economical utensils."
The same publication cites a still more amusing fact :
"A European merchant had the brilliant idea of exporting to China a consignment of horseshoes bearing for trademark a most effective and irresistible dragon. What was his stupefaction to learn that the Chinese turned from his goods with anger ! He had not reflected that a dragon figures on the national escutcheon of the Celestial Empire, and that the Celestials would consider it sacrilege to allow a horse to defile this august emblem with his hoofs."
There is another story of an English merchantwho put some excellent needles on the Chinese market, needles which ought to have defied all competition, and
(264) then fell to vainly racking his brains to explain to himself why they did not sell. He did not know that in China black is a symbol of sorrow, and always carries ill-luck; and these excellent English needles were done up in sheaths of black paper, so that the Chinese preferred inferior needles from other quarters, which were done up in red or green.
If I enter into such details as these it is to show what elements go to the making of the success of a nation to-day. Taken separately, these details seem infinitesimal. It is the sum of them that makes their importance, and that importance is immense. The turn of mind which allows a German seriously to preoccupy himself with the way in which a Chinaman cooks his rice may seem very contemptible to a Frenchman, whose mind is taken up with such high matters as the revision of the constitution, the separation of Church and State, the utility of learning Greek, and so forth ; but nevertheless the Latins have got to understand that their part in the world will soon be terminated, and that they will utterly disappear from history, if they do not become resigned to abandon their useless theoretical discussions, their futile and sentimental phraseology, in order to busy themselves about these petty practical questions on which the lives of nations to-day depend. No Government can give them what they lack. They must seek help in themselves, not from outside.
Is it to be thought that the application of Socialistic doctrines would remedy the state of things set forth in this chapter? Would a Socialist society, even more formalistic than ours, be the one to develop that spirit of enterprise and that energy which are so necessary to-day, and which the Latins lack so greatly ? When the Collectivist State directs everything, makes everything, dill products be better and less costly, their exportation easier, and foreign competition less to be feared ? To believe it
(265) one would have to ignore the universal laws of industry and commerce. If decadence is far advanced among the Latin nations, it is precisely because State Socialism has for a long time been making immense progress among them, arid because they are incapable of undertaking anything whatever without continual assistance from the Government. We have only to make the Socialist conquest more complete still further to accentuate this decadence.
