Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Blaðsíða 19

THE BALANCE OF WORLD ECONOMY
i3
It did not spring from any internal source in Europe itself, for
instance technical progress. It came from outside, from the colo-
nies, and especially the Western colonies, whose purchasing power
was gradually influencing European production. Handicraft was
no longer sufficient to satisfy the demand and had to be replaced
by mechanical means, technical developments. It is of vital im-
portance to understand this if we are to understand present con-
ditions. We must therefore enlarge a little more on this theme.
We must know what kind of people these settlers were. Why
did they need help from European production? And here we
have to distinguish between the great westward and the small
eastward emigration, for it was entirely different people who
went East and West.
We may leave out of account the earliest westward migrat-
ion, what may be called the robber stage, when the pioneers
only sought gold and silver, killed and plundered until the scanty
existing population had been destroyed or decimated, and where
it is difficult to say which European nation behaved the worst,
But at a later stage we find a good description of the Western
colonists by Lord Macaulay, the famous English historian, in
his speech on the factories bill, delivered in the House of Com-
tnons on the 22nd May 1846, about a century ago:
“Look to America. Two centuries ago it was a wilderness of
buffaloes and wolves. What has caused the change? Is it her
rich mould? Is it her mightly rivers? Is it her broad waters? No;
Ber plains were then as fertile as they are now; her rivers were
as numerous. Nor was it any great amount of capital that the
cmigrants carried with them. They took a mere pittance. What
ls it then that has affected the change? It is simply this — you
placed the Englishman instead of the red man upon the soil;
and the Englishman, intelligent and energetic, cut down the
torests, turned them into cities and fleets, and covered the land
with harvests and orchards in their place. The great instrument
that produces wealth is man.”1)
If, therefore, we leave out of consideration what we have
termed the robber stage, it was people of this kind who really
founded the western colonies, poor but industrious settlers who
Bad their hands full with sowing and reaping for their livelihood,
with hunting the beasts whose skins they sold to Europe, with
) Parliamentary Debates, vol. LXXXVI p. 1042.