7/17/2019 The New Form of Wealth

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-new-form-of-wealth 1/1

We need not argue that human character is absolutely better than it was in earlier centuries, nor even that the predatory instincts of mankind have grown appreciably weaker. Human character, for that matter, is not a fixed or self-subsistent thing; it is the habit which human beings acquire of adjusting themselves to their environment. The environment changes and the character with it. What mainlydifferentiates our century from those which went before it is that the forms ofwealth have changed. Wealth in the days of the wars for a balance of power meant primarily land. Wealth in our day is primarily the opportunity for peculiarly profitable investment. This economic evolution has modified most of our social institutions, and with them our diplomacy. Conquest in the old sense of the worldhas become obsolete. A predatory Power does not go out with drums and banners to seize estates for its feudal aristocracy. It applies pressure, and pressure which often involves the possession of fleets and armies, to secure concessions for its financiers. There is no advance in morality here, no conscious progress towards a Golden Age. The change cannot be described in phrases from Isaiah or in verses from Vergil. It is a non-moral development, but it has none the less a direct bearing upon our hopes of peace. The instinct to conquer is as sharp and insatiable as ever, but it has found a means of conquering beyond frontiers. Our modern conquistadores do not burn their ships when they alight on coveted soil, as though to anchor themselves for ever on its fertile acres. Our bankers will not do in China what Cortes and Pizarro did in the New World. They build a railwayor sink a mine. Our Ahabs do not take Naboth's vineyard; they invest money in it. The struggle for a balance of power means to-day a struggle for liberty. and opportunity to use "places in the sun" across the seas. For the modern world a pl

ace in the sun is not a smiling valley, or a rich plain in which a victorious army will settle, and build homes and found families. It is a territory to "exploit," and the active agents in the process are now the bankers and investors who float loans, and secure concessions. Even where conquest is incidentally necessary, as in Morocco, there is no migration to the new territory and the conqueringPower rarely troubles to annex it It "occupies" it, only because without occupation it cannot safely employ its capital in building railways or sinking mines. Land-hunger is not the malady of the modern world. In all this we shall not discover the faintest resemblance to the perils and ambitions which roused the passions and stimulated the sacrifices of the earlier struggles for a balance of power.