Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 14

8
LE NORD
an increasing extent industrialised. This is what has made it
possible for a crowded population to maintain a high standard
of living. But industrialisation requires one definite condition:
a market where the goods can be sold. Europe had such a market
until 1913. In the years leading up to 1913 the sale of European
goods to overseas countries amounted to about £ 2000 millions
(gold) annually. That was what secured the high standard of
living. This market is gradually slipping out of our hands, and
we can only recover our economic position if we can regenerate
it ourselves, as we have done it before, but the terms will pro-
bably now be more onerous. ¥e must therefore make it clear
to ourselves how Europe formerly created the economic position
she held at the beginning of this century, in the years preceding
the world war of 1914—18.
The hackneyed explanation of Europe’s enormous economic
expansion in the i9th century is that this was the century of
technique, and that the unique ascendancy of Europe in that
century was due to technical progress. This is sheer nonsense,
for technique can create nothing. It has no life and is but a means
requiring one definite condition to become operative, a market
with purchasing power. And impoverished Europe, still suf-
fering from the effects of the Napoleonic wars, could not create
purchasing power within her own territory.
We certainly hear of magnificent building enterprises, of
splendour and festivities as far back as in the i/th century, for
instance in the France of Louis XIV, but we are apt to forget
that this standard of living was the privilege of a strictly limited
circle; only a small fraction of the privileged classes, nobility
and clergy, who were largely exempted from taxation and held
all manner of rights, but who nevertheless were ruined by the
expenses of court life. The court was the centre of this circle
which had to be supported directly and indirectly by the King,
i. e. by the State, when it failed to support itself. The country
nobleman on his estate, the rural priest in his parish lived in
humble conditions or even in poverty in a degree which we find
it difficult to conceive to-day. They were entirely incapable of
providing a purchasing market. But where then did the money
come from which the court and the narrow inner circle squander-
ed? That was what the rest of the community, however poor
it might be, had to pay through the taxes, socage, dues on pri-
vileges etc., with the result that the great mass of the common