Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/239

 The extension of economic order by democracy beyond its borders, as trustee and administrator of the welfare of immature peoples, is in no way incompatible with our high ideals if we said to these peoples: “We are here to preserve order and to increase facilities for production and exchange. Your basic economic limitations within your boundaries are identically the same as ours,—land-area, population and time. The charge of administration shall rest on the base of this triangle, namely, land-area valued in terms of population and time.” It is the remnants of autocracy, like decayed teeth, which plague the extensions of democratic order. In the case of Ireland it is probably the absolute ignorance of economic science that keeps the struggle at the pitch of delirium amongst a normally warm-hearted, logical and generous people. Memories, surviving from the days when Ireland was an economic preserve, of absentee landlordism and burdensome tariffs, the seductive Sinn Fein economic propaganda, obviously borrowed from Russia; and the cry that all revenue shall now be raised by tariffs or wrung from the industry of the North under the desired Republican régime, while the land of the small owner goes free—it is these things that pile confusion on confusion. The fear of long-past tariffs and exactions has been converted by slow ferment and now become a dream of new tariffs and exactions, so that while the antagonists are the same, the basic economic causes for which they are fighting are reversed. If, instead of argument in terms of assassination and reprisal, it were clearly understood that each square foot of Ireland’s sacred soil represented a square foot of economic sovereignty as determined by population, and should be acknowledged by sovereign responsibility in the form of taxes, the South might lose much of its interest in independence and the North much of its apprehension. The same thing is probably true of the Philippines, though the landlords there are a home-grown product, and have not yet found it necessary to absent themselves. Political independence is agitated for without any conception of the domestic economic coercion already in existence.