Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Because of the large number of enterprises involved and the small size of many of them, direct regulation by the government was less likely in the field of agriculture. Here conditions were generally more competitive than in industry, with the result that farm prices had shown a growing tendency to fluctuate more widely than industrial prices. This continued during the war, as agricultural regulation was left more completely to the influence of price changes than other parts of the economy. As farm prices soared, farmers became more prosperous than they had been in decades, and sought madly to increase their share of the rain of money by bringing larger and larger amounts of land under cultivation. This was not possible in Europe because of the lack of men, equipment, and fertilizers; but in Canada, the United States, Australia, and South America land was brought under the plow which, because of lack of rainfall or its inaccessibility to peacetime markets, should never have been brought under cultivation. In Canada the increase in wheat acreage was from 9.9 million in the years 1909-1913 to 22.1 million in the years 1921-25. In the United States the increase in wheat acreage was from 47.0 million to 58.1 million in the same period. Canada increased her share of the world’s wheat crop from 14 percent to 39 percent in this decade. Farmers went into debt to obtain these lands, and by 1920 were buried under a mountain of mortgages which would have been considered unbearable before 1914 but which in the boom of wartime prosperity and high prices was hardly given a second thought.

In Europe such expansion of acreage was not possible, although grasslands were plowed up in Britain and some other countries. In Europe as a whole, acreage under cultivation declined, by 15 percent for cereals in 1913-1919. Livestock numbers were also reduced (swine by 22 percent and cattle by 7 percent in 1913-1920). Woodlands were cut for fuel when importation of coal was stopped from England, Germany, or Poland. Since most of Europe was cut off from Chile, which had been the chief prewar source of nitrates, or from North Africa and Germany, which had produced much of the prewar supply of phosphates, the use of these and other fertilizers was reduced. This resulted in an exhaustion of the soil so great that in some countries, like Germany, the soil had not recovered its fertility by 1930. When the German chemist Haber discovered a method for extracting nitrogen from the air which made it possible for his country to survive the cutting off of Chilean nitrates, the new supply was used almost entirely to produce explosives, with little left over for fertilizers. The declining fertility of the soil and the fact that new lands of lesser natural fertility were brought under cultivation led to drastic declines in agricultural output per acre (in cereals about 15 percent in 1914-1919).

These adverse influences were most evident in Germany, where the number of hogs fell from 25.3 million in 1914 to 5.7 million in 1918; the average weight of slaughtered cattle fell from 250 kilos in 1913 to 130 in 1918; the acreage in sugar beets fell from 592,843 hectares in 1914 to 366,505 in 1919, while the yield of sugar beets per hectare fell from 31,800 kilos in 1914 to 16,350 kilos in 1920. German’s prewar imports of about 6 1/2 million tons of cereals each year ceased, and her home production of these fell by 3 million tons per year. Her prewar imports of over 2 million tons of oil concentrates and other feed for farm animals stopped. The results of the blockade were devastating. Continued for nine months after the armistice, it caused the deaths of 800,000 persons, according to Max Sering. In addition, reparations took about 108,000 horses, 205,000 cattle, 426,000 sheep, and 240,000 fowl.

More damaging than the reduction in the number of farm animals (which was made up in six or seven years), or the drain on the fertility of the soil (which could be made up in twelve or fifteen years), was the disruption of Europe’s integration of agricultural production (which was never made up). The blockade of the Central Powers tore the heart out of the prewar integration. When the war ended, it was impossible to replace this, because there were many new political boundaries; these boundaries were marked by constantly rising tariff restrictions, and the non-European world had increased both its agricultural and industrial output to a point where it was much less dependent on Europe.

The heavy casualties, the growing shortages, the slow decline in quality of goods, and the gradual growth of the use of substitutes, as well as the constantly increasing pressure of governments on the activities of their citizens—all these placed a great strain on the morale of the various European peoples. The importance of this question was just as great in the autocratic and semi-democratic countries as it was in the ones with fully democratic and parliamentary regimes. The latter did not generally permit any general elections during the war, but both types required the full support of their peoples in order to maintain their battle lines and economic activities at full effectiveness. At the beginning, the fever of patriotism and national enthusiasm was so great that this was no problem. Ancient and deadly political rivals clasped hands, or even sat in the same Cabinet, and pledged a united front to the enemy of their fatherland. But disillusionment was quick, and appeared as early as the winter of 1914. This change was parallel to the growth of the realization that the war was to be a long one and not the lightning stroke of a single campaign and a single battle which all had expected. The inadequacies of the preparations to deal with the heavy casualties or to provide munitions for the needs of modern war, as well as the shortage or disruption of the supply of civilian goods, led to public agitation. Committees were formed, but proved relatively ineffective, and in most activities in most countries were replaced by single-headed agencies equipped with extensive controls. The use of voluntary or semi-voluntary methods of control generally vanished with the committees and were replaced by compulsion, however covert. In governments as wholes a somewhat similar shifting of personnel took place until each Cabinet came to be dominated by a single man, endowed with greater energy, or a greater willingness to make quick decisions on scanty information than his fellows. In this way Lloyd George replaced Asquith in England; Clemenceau replaced a series of lesser leaders in France; Wilson strengthened his control on his own government in the United States; and, in a distinctly German way, Ludendorff came to dominate the government of his country. In order to build up the morale of their own peoples and to lower that of their enemies, countries engaged in a variety of activities designed to regulate the flow of information to these peoples. This involved censorship, propaganda, and curtailment of civil liberties. These were established in all countries, without a hitch in the Central Powers and Russia where there were long traditions of extensive police authority, but no less effectively in France and Britain. In France a State of Siege was proclaimed on August 2, 1914. This gave the government the right to rule by decree, established censorship, and placed the police under military control. In general, French censorship was not so severe as the German nor so skillful as the British, while their propaganda was far better than the German but could not compare with the British. The complexities of French political life and the slow movement of its bureaucracy allowed all kinds of delays and evasions of control, especially by influential persons. When Clemenceau was in opposition to the government in the early days of the war, his paper, L’homme libre, was suspended; he continued to publish it with impunity under the name L‘homme enchainé. The British censorship was established on August 5, 1914, and at once intercepted all cables and private mail which it could reach, including that of neutral countries. These at once became an important source of military and economic intelligence. A Defence of the Realm Act (familiarly known as DORA) was passed giving the government the power to censor all information. A Press Censorship Committee was set up in 1914 and was replaced by the Press Bureau under Frederick E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) in 1916. Established in Crewe House, it was able to control all news printed in the press, acting as the direct agent of the Admiralty and War Offices. The censorship of printed books was fairly lenient, and was much more so for books to be read in England than for books for export, with the result that “best sellers” in England were unknown in America. Parallel with the censorship was the War Propaganda Bureau under Sir Charles Masterman, which had an American Bureau of Information under Sir Gilbert Parker at Wellington House. This last agency was able to control almost all information going to the American press, and by 1916 was acting as an international news service itself, distributing European news to about 35 American papers which had no foreign reporters of their own.