The end of a paper-chase

JEFFERSON CHASE

A world which placed faith in the validity of paper contracts based on pretence, at last begins to wonder

For at least fifty years, the entire Western World, led by the United States, has been tearing across political history, up social hills, down economic dales, through thickets of armaments, over streams of demagogy, across bogs of conservatism, in hot and headlong pursuit of what? Utopia? No blinding vision of things as they might be, no rational theory of things as they should be, seems to have caused this frantic dash. The utilization of wood-pulp and the discovery and development of large sources of timber suitable for the manufacture of paper appear to have been the only reason back of this orgy of articulation.

The human race has never been so articulate; paper has never been so cheap or plentiful. Humanity became so intoxicated with the written word that it completely lost sight of the realities which must give force to words. The promise was confused with the purpose and values with equities. On and on we raced, scattering bank-notes, leases, contracts, laws, treaties, until all our civilization was buried beneath drifts of printer's ink and foolscap.

The amazing thing about it all was that it worked. Papers were shuffled and signed and exchanged and behold! great buildings arose, miners burrowed underground, steel rails crawled like snakes across the prairies, riveters drummed in shipyards and the banker became lord high custodian of the papersack. Bushels of -wheat, bales of cotton, tons of coal, car-loads of pig-iron, sprang out of the ground and moved to their destinations. Like a glittering mirage, behind and not in front of the paper-chasers, a stupendous civilization arose out of the raw earth in shining towers and battlements.

More papers were signed and the habits and manners of entire nations were regimented and dragooned. People were arrested for doing in one year what had been innocent the year before. More papers were printed and signed, and peoples arose and hurled themselves at each other; millions of men, women and children perished miserably beneath the sea of torment and tortuous verbosity. We became insane about paper. We gave slips of paper for another kind of paper and then traded that paper back for more slips or differently colored slips than those which we had originally given. We poured the wealth of our country overseas and counted ourselves wealthy because we got in return large and beautifully engraved slips of paper, which promised to give us twice a year smaller and more beautifully colored little scraps of paper.

The end came, not suddenly, as so many of us suppose, but gradually. It began in 1914, when Bethmann-Hollweg referred to a treaty drawn up a hundred years ago as "a scrap of paper". We were profoundly shocked. We were shocked again when Germany repudiated the entire series of papers which had centered around the use of submarines. We were shaken to the core when Soviet Russia announced that it did not intend to be bound by the paper bonds which the Tsars had placed upon the Russian people. We fought a great war to make the world safe for paper. We got a paper victory, but we have lost the war.

We are now discovering that paper is the weakest of all the structures on which civilization can be reared. It is heady stuff, because some paper is true and other paper is false, and because paper which is true at one time is false at another. Other ages have reared their life on solid things: Rome on the bronze of the legionaries and the brick and masonry of roads and bridges; Europe of the early nineteenth century on gold and goods, wheat and steel. It remained for us to stake our entire livelihood on a scrap of paper. We have learned that paper tears easily.

The debacle which we are now witnessing is the collapse of a papier-mache myth. Bit by bit, in every field of life, we are discovering that paper is no substitute for reality and that where paper does not represent reality, the paper disappears.

The first and greatest example before our eyes is in the realm of customs and morals. Excessive alcoholism is clearly a menace in a mechanical civilization and temperance has always been recognized as a virtue. Fullblown with moral arrogance, as a paper-bag is filled with hot air, we enacted a law of prohibition. The law did not work and is not working now because it had no real relation to the habits of the American animal. People have continued to drink intoxicants, the liquor traffic has not been destroyed and the political and social evils of alcoholism have been translated into the sphere of irresponsible outlawry. Another and even more dramatic example lies before us in Russia. The moral dangers of individual greed, and the social and political dangers inseparable from the fact that a man is owned by his possessions, make a perfect intellectual case for Communism. The only trouble with Communism is that it is not true of human nature and that human nature changes so slowly that it is sheer torture literally to apply to any substantial portion of humanity the papers written by Karl Marx. For fifteen years, we have witnessed Russia writhing under a false paper civilization, forced to make concessions here, to discount premises there, until it is obvious that in another fifty years Russia will be very like the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world will be very like Russia.

Turning to business—and the world lives by business—we find the same false conception of paper underlying our attitude. Paper is not wealth and never can be wealth. Yet, after the war, we thought we had discovered an air-tight container for American prosperity in the notion that we could enrich ourselves by trading goods for paper. For twelve years we got rid of nearly a billion dollars worth of goods a year in this way and asked nothing in return but pieces of paper: foreign bonds, commercial promissory notes, banknotes. A billion dollars worth? The fact is that we took cotton which might have made clothes for our people, wheat which might have fed them, petroleum which might have transported them, and a wide variety of articles which might have given them opportunities for pleasure and comfort, and hurried them out of the country, taking only paper in return. In the final analysis, it meant that between one and two million Americans were devoting their lives and energies to producing something for nothing, or something for scraps of paper.

In the field of international relations, the paper nets we cast were drawn up, filled to bursting with struggling paper fishes. Ten years ago we settled the Chinese question by the Nine-Power Treaty; we settled the question of naval armaments by the treaties of 1922 and 1930; we settled the question of war and peace by the Briand-KeRogg Pact of 1928. The world settled the question of peace and security by the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The victorious allies settled the question of Germany and her defeated allies by the Treaties of Versailles, Neuilly, St.-Germain and Trianon. (The world resolutely closed its eyes to the significance of Turkey's refusal to jump through the paper hoop of the Treaty of Sevres and the success of Mustafa Kemal in winning national independence from the victors.) Everything was settled and solid—on paper.

In reality, nothing was settled. The German youth surged resentfully against the paper bulwarks of Versailles, which held only because they were backed by the steel and gold of France. The Japanese found ways of dealing with China which were not nominated in the bond. The question of navies continued to torment admirals, statesmen and tax-collectors. The great paper triumph of the post-war era, the settlement of the war debts by the Debt Funding Agreements and the regularization of the German reparations regime by the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan, came into violent collision with political, financial and economic realities. On every side there was the sound of the tearing up of scraps of paper: evidences of debt, engagements to do this, that or t'other thing, pretences that human nature is what it isn't and that things are not as they are.

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Now the world finds itself, panting and exhausted, at the end of its course, looking back over its run and seeing the towers and battlements toppling and the walls of society swaying like the walls of Jericho before the trumpet call of realism. We are still too excited and bewildered to realize what is happening. We still hope that this structure can be propped up and that this causeway need not be engulfed. We need not worry. Not all of the paper we have scattered is worthless. Where the paper represents the truth, what we have built will last out our time. Nothing on earth can save what we have constructed out of tissues of falsehoods.

If we are cool-headed and dispassionate—which few of us ever are—we can see that a few facts are already towering above the sea of paper. These facts have been obvious throughout the ages; it is only that we have trained ourselves not to recognize them. The first fact is the nature of man himself.

Men will always be guided by their own interests in any prolonged civilization. Men are selfish and their selfishness needs restraint. Men are intemperate and their lusts and passions must be controlled. Men can suffer many things, and most of all stupidity, without revolt, but will always punish falsehood and pretense with an ultimate and ugly vengeance. Laws and social and political systems must adjust themselves to these facts.

The second fact is that wealth consists of the production and distribution of useful material objects and services—food, fuel, clothing, shelter, tools, transportation, amusement, education, recreation. On this basis, a well-built chicken coop is more important than the most beautifully engraved stock-certificate in the world, unless that certificate assures to its possessor the means to construct more chicken-coops. A mortgage is less important than a house, a foreign bond means less than foreign trade. The moment that paper transactions enter the something-for-nothing region, whether it be in terms of margin speculations or foreign loans, the paper tears. When debts cannot be repaid, they are cancelled, whether by means of bankruptcy, repudiation or involuntary default. When contracts cannot be lived up to, contracts are broken. And whenever a business or political system proves itself injurious to the people who live by it, it will be ruthlessly changed.

In the third place, our whole conception of international relations has to be modified to fit the facts. Peace is demonstrably desirable, but peace has its price. That price may well be the possession of instruments of war, if not war itself.

And finally, we have begun to discover that all scraps of paper are not free and equal. Some papers, in the long run, have more power to determine the future history of mankind than even the strongest navy. To assign relative values is the work of the moralist, but it seems perfectly obvious that the Bible, the Bill of Rights, Das Kapital and the Declaration of Independence represent something which is greater than machine guns and stronger than super-dreadnaughts: namely, religion, personal liberty, social cooperation and national self-determination.

An age has ended and a new era is beginning. There is not one man alive who can speak with any degree of accuracy or authority on the future.

It is time to take an inventory of our stock in trade and if necessary to begin all over again with a Burning of the Books, rather than to struggle as we have done for a generation in the fly-paper of a civilization which has preferred mirages to mankind and has placed words before deeds.