BELGIUM and France might have been encouraged by the good news from the nutrition chemists at Williamstown about the prospect of food from the air and sun, and also by the black case they made out against white bread. For the Belgian and French people have gone back on the war basis of “black bread” as part of the national effort to economize, pay off their debts, and redeem their depreciated currency.
The plight of Belgium and France is a striking example of the stubborn facts of the actual world. The bills for war may be put off, but they cannot be dodged. And the money that has been spent in war is gone. It has not been transformed into any productive enterprise. It has been literally “blown up.”
A nation recovering from a war may inflate its currency and so secure a passing period of apparently easy money, artificial expansion of business, and illusory prosperity. But when the exchange value of its currency slides too far down and inflation has to stop, there will follow a period of hard times or of panic depending on how far the process has gone.
During the process of readjustment to sound principles the actual costs of labor and manufacture will be higher, products will be dearer, and foreign trade will be lost because it is harder to sell in competition in markets abroad. Germany has learned this by ruinous experience, in which a powerful and ruthless class of financiers and industrialists practically bankrupted the state and great numbers of the middle and professional classes. Belgium and France, now that they have taken the hard road of return to sane finance, will have to learn the same lesson, in terms undoubtedly less harsh but equally inevitable.
Europe suggests, of course, that part of this difficulty might be met by canceling the war debts. But this would not mean wiping out some of the costs of war, although it might seem to many Europeans to accomplish that happy result. It would merely mean transferring them to the account of the people of the United States. Whether Europe or America should bear them has been allowed to become, unhappily, a matter of bitter and unreasonable dispute. But if Americans will stop to think what it means to Europeans to be eating war bread in peace time, nearly nine years after the Armistice, it may aid an understanding of their point of view and further at least a more kindly consideration of the whole complicated question of restoring the normal life of the world.
Source: The Outlook, Sept 1, 1926