Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 133

ECONOMIC ADAPTATION
127
be considered, nor negotiated, or indeed carried into practice
without the collaboration of the state.
Thus abandoning the state’s passive attitude to industrial
life, at least as a guiding principle and an ideal, is a hard blow
to many who have been born and bred in the belief that this
represented the climax of wisdom in economic policy. Its de-
thronement strikes the various industries more or less hard ac-
cording to the nature of the industry. Trade is the hardest hit
because commerce is essentially based on freedom. The men of
commerce are the scouts of economic life, its eyes which at home
and abroad seek new possibilities, new markets. Wherever a
chance is discovered it must be exploited now, at once; waiting
means usually that it is lost. And the machinery of government
is invariably a slow thing, working moreover along fixed grooves
and unaware of the fact that the very function of commerce
requires a sense of new roads and their speedy utilisation. This
is why the equipment of commerce, unlike that of other branches
of economic activity, is so easy to handle. A cheque-book — and
then of course genius, which does not take up much room —
is all that is required. The other industries are differently en-
cumbered. Manufacturing industry with its buildings and ma-
chinery, agriculture with the land and its several years rotation.
And then the men of commerce are suddenly one day faced with
the inevitable: the limitation of freedom, and by what? By the
state, the very Belial of the true trader’s imagination, which he
believed to have been long ago enlisted in the brigade of bogies
only used by second rate teachers to frighten children with. Is
it strange that the clever business man, the born trader who has
so to speak made his business his calling, feels that a blow has
been struck at his vital nerve and at first collapses like one who
discovers in the middle of his trying life’s work that he is the
victim of a cancer which will lay him in his grave in a few
months? He simply refuses to believe it; he regards it as impos-
sible. But it is possible. It is more than that, it is inevitable; it
allows one only to adapt oneself to conditions and demands,
which cannot in any way be avoided, because they come from
outside, from a development which cannot be diverted and in
which great centres of force, powerful states undertake the leader-
ship and organisation.
The commercial trade must certainly feel that it has been
the hardest hit, but it also can, must and will adapt itself. And