Chapter XXII. The Energy Circuit in Wartime

CHAPTER XXII The Energy Circuit in Wartime War is a large scale demonstration of the nature of government as mechanism and its relation to the flow of energy. The main reason why government is identified with power is that the authorization and conduct of war is reserved to the political agency 5 but if this impression is examined as a proposition in physics, it will be found to be the reverse of the truth. Government is repressive structure and expropriative mechanism, by which in peacetime the energy of the citizens is backed up from the fighting channel, to be released, not originated or created, when war is begun. The head of power lies back of the dam. It is not in the army but in the nation, for it consists of surplus production, in both personnel and materials. An army in being is withdrawn from production, and can function only on a continuous supply from the civil life of the nation. It is an endappliance. Hence nations and empires of long duration are always those of a civilian character, and always seem to be unready for war.

Military science as such considers only the action of the endappliance, and is at a loss when armies become ineffective. The war strength of a nation is generally computed in manpower and armament, including stationary defense works. It is on such calculations that projects for world conquest by force of arms are undertaken 5 and though they always fail, the inherent reason why they must fail is not perceived. Though production is the true measure of military power, a gross or total estimate may be even more fatally misleading. Production is the flow of energy. It indicates the available striking force if the connection between the civil order and 262 THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 263 the army is correct; otherwise, it reveals only the potential scope o£ disaster. The correct relation depends upon the mode of conversion of energy in use. In a primitive economy, the available force is a simple percentage. The savage warrior is also the fighter; he is self-subsistent and self-regulating, equating in himself the belligerent impulse and the control. There is no external organization or command. This also holds good for the nomad pastoral society; the fighting men must maintain their own source of supply and the supply lines, for they are also the producers. In either case, it is obvious that the tribe cannot expend its manpower in a ratio exceeding natural replacements, over a given term of years, without absolute defeat by extinction.

In settled agricultural communities with a handicraft culture, some degree of specific military organization becomes practicable. But the appropriate type of organization is determined by the extent to which trade is developed. In this respect, the Roman republic was a more advanced economy than that of strict feudalism. The feudal society was a fully organized agrarian economy; and the narrow limit of liability to military service was determined by the scanty margin of surplus production. A feudal seigneury was required to furnish only a certain number of men, approximating to the landholding, who were expected to keep the field only for a few weeks in the year. It would have been useless to demand more; the economy could not equip nor subsist them, with its meager food supply and short-range transport facilities. The fighting men, knights, squires, and grooms, did not do much productive work, so they could easily be spared, as they had to be supported in peace no less than in war. The producers were practically exempt from military service. Though the feudal fighting men were at the call of the overlord or king, and under his nominal command in war, the real control was local; it answered to the supplies from home. So the rules of war were made accordingly. In its mili264 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE tary resources, the Roman republic was five hundred years ahead of feudalism; there was just enough trade and money to permit centralized command, and a wider radius of action.

It was possible to take a greater percentage of manpower; therefore every able-bodied citizen was liable to service in emergency. Conscription remained practicable because the radius was still limited, and it was also consonant with the f atria fotestas in the moral order. When the national revenue is derived mainly from trade, as in the Roman empire and the British empire, conscription ceases to be practicable. The army is a co-efficient of the commercial system; its effectiveness is found in proportion to its mobility, speed, discipline, and constant readiness, rather than its size. This requires a professional army, a minimum always in service instead of a maximum called out for a short term on special occasions. Conscription was abandoned, of necessity, in Rome as in England, precisely when those nations became empires. Money is the medium of a contract society; and it calls for a consonant relation of the army to the nation.

The workable conditions of a military state, organized for "total war," have been perfectly exemplified just once in history, and its limits shown, by Sparta. Production was extorted from slaves, which kept the economy on the lowest subsistence level. All the male citizens (non-slaves) were soldiers; but they could not go far from home to fight, having no lateral facilities—no trade, no money, no transport. The Spartan model was flawless of its dreadful kind. It survived for a considerable period in a static condition; but when it tried to expand—being supplied by the mercantile Greek states for warfare over an extended radius—it fell to pieces. No such state can make good a conquest over a nation of higher production; it will be undone by victory if not by defeat. Any military state which tries to utilize a machine economy will suffer even more rapid dissolution. Military theory is largely meaningless because it deals with the conduct of armies in being, regardless of the civil order THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 265 from which they are drawn. Even though the strategy, tactics, and technology may be theoretically identical, a professional army, a mercenary army, and a citizen army fight upon different principles, in accordance with their relation to the civil order.

The professional army, though devoutly loyal to its own country, must fight for its own preservation as an army, as much as for immediate victory. The intermittent object is a particular victory ; the specific object is to win a war; but the constant object is to keep the army in being indefinitely. This does not mean that the troops will lack courage at any time; on the contrary, they must never fail in resolution, and any part of the army may be required to take the brunt at any time, at the utmost cost to the detachment. The most demoralizing condition for a professional army is to be involved or used, or to believe that it is being used, by internal factions of its own country. A professional army is an instrument of constituted authority: its hook-up for energy is with the central or trunk line ; its normal interest is that of the whole country through the government; and the private interest of the soldiers is confined to their profession. When it is used by a part of the nation against a part of the nation, there is a short circuit ; hence even the employment of the army for extraordinary police duty may be a dubious expedient.

A mercenary army fights for its own hand; its interest is in extortion, and can be gauged only by a series of short views. When strictly mercenary armies existed, they were open to offers from any side and were unlikely to do any more fighting than would pay them. Generally they were as dangerous to their employers as to the enemy. They could hardly be demoralized, beyond their ordinary condition; when they exist, it indicates the lack of a normal civil order in the nations which employ them. They were the outcome of a trading economy which had no adequate political structure, no regional bases. A citizen army fights for the interest of the soldiers as citizens, looking to the consequences of the actual war in which 266 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE they are engaged. The most positive incentive for a citizen army to fight is the desire to go home; but this means that the soldier must expect to find at home the objective for which he is fighting. The interest of the citizen soldier is that of a producer, a man who has left a job and property. The most demoralizing condition for a citizen army is the knowledge or suspicion that the rights of the individual soldiers as citizens are being impaired under cover of the war. The citizen army fights for a definite cause, which is thought to be attainable by the war; and if the cause disappears, the army dissolves.

The citizen soldier is sustained on the energy of the private production line of his civilian life, which is temporarily cut in to the military outlet j the civilian line carries the load. If the civilian energy circuit is cut or tampered with, the peak load cannot be maintained. Hence the fact, of historic record, that it is always the largest army a nation can raise which suddenly melts away. And however it may be raised, organized or commanded, an army which is very large in proportion to the size of its nation has the character of a citizen army. It fights with matchless energy when it does fight; and crumbles to nothing when it crumbles, as with the armies of Napoleon, of the Czar, and of Germany at the end of the first World War. The weakness of purely military theory is' evident when it is applied to any war of the past. By the formal rules, the American Revolution should have been lost before it was well begun, and a dozen times afterward. Confronted by these technical impossibilities, the theorists go wild and speculate on what might have happened if Washington had received more adequate support from Congress; if conscription had been resorted to 5 and so on—whereas if either Americans or Englishmen had been amenable to conscription at that time, there could have been no Revolutionary War at all; nor would there have been any such war if a Congress with definite federal authority had been in existence previously, because such a government must have pertained to an already independent naTHE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 267 tion. Again, theorists have suggested that the Civil War might have been won by the Federal government in the first campaign if there had been a sufficient standing army to begin with. But the Confederate forces were led by a soldier who had resigned his Federal commission on secession; a large standing army would have been divided in its allegiance. Wars have to be fought in whatever conditions obtain at the time.

They spring from those conditions. But in all and any circumstances, the indispensable condition for ultimate victory is that the producers shall retain control of the production system, so that only the endproduct may be taken off for military purposes. The reason this condition is not understood is that in reckoning military effectiveness time is not considered as a factor; no distinction is drawn between short term and long term results. Napoleon is esteemed a master of the art of war because he won numerous battles and over-ran a wide territory during a period of less than twenty years; but at the end, the nation he commanded was exhausted and occupied by its enemies. He* had command of the total resources of the nation. Since his time, France has steadily declined in military power, while faithfully maintaining the system used by Napoleon. How did that particular sequence occur—a burst of overwhelming energy followed by a long decline? It was not only that Napoleon emptied the reservoir of surplus energy, but that the sluice gate was left open, with general peacetime conscription, so that the full head of power could never form again. Subsequently Germany followed the same course, with the same attendant phenomena, to the same end, in somewhat accelerated tempo. France was unified by Louis XIV, who won numerous victories and over-ran Europe, to end in defeat; bankruptcy and collapse ensued shortly; the process was repeated in the Revolution and the regime of Napoleon. Bismarck "unified" the German principalities and won victories; Germany over-ran Europe in 1914, was defeated, collapsed in bankruptcy; and has repeated the process in the present world 268 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE war. These "men of power" are in reality mere scraps of wreckage, floating rubbish in a flood, distinguished by their lack of productive ability and responsibility.

Widespread misery must ensue whenever an army is supplied from a source—whether internal or external—over which the producers have no control. This is a recurrent possibility ; it occurs when the kinetic energy has undercut the political bases. It causes wars of the most terrible type, in which nobody is able to make peace. The Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, and the Thirty Years War were of this kind. The break in control is most apparent in the Thirty Years War. The authority of the Holy Roman Emperor was nominally valid for raising an army; but the emperor's direct revenues were inadequate to sustain large forces in the field, for any length of time. The emperor therefore authorized an aristocratic soldier of fortune, Count Wallenstein, to recruit soldiers and subsist them by loot or forced tribute. Other sovereigns, for their own ends, contributed cash subsidies to Wallenstein from time to time. In consequence, there was no effective control over Wallenstein's army; the emperor could not disband it when he wished to; the soldiers roamed about like bands of wolves, eating the country bare and committing ghastly atrocities. When peace came, it was the peace of desolation, the army itself being starved out and the countryside almost depopulated. That was practically the finish of the Holy Roman Empire. Now the effect would have been precisely the same if the Emperor had been in a position to seize the total resources of his subjects for military use; in either case, the situation is that the military agency is not under control of the productive element. Europe at present is in a war of the same type. The governments have taken over the total resources of their nations. All the armies are fighting on the diminishing returns of their capital resources and some subsidies from America. They cannot hope to return to civil life because there is no civil life; neither are they professional soldiers; so they must fight for no objective. The obscure problem is concealed THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 269 by the apparent problem, for the obscure problem is that there is no control over the armies. (When a motor car cannot be stopped by the people in it, it is out of control.) The nominal commanders of the armies of Europe dare not let them go home. The armies are immense portions of dislocated mass crashing against one another by momentum; and the soldiers are cut off from both past and future, because the production circuit of Europe has been cut through and destroyed. For nations in this situation, not even the cessation of fighting can bring relief, because their governments cannot disband such monstrous armies in any case. They must remain on a war footing. The fact is acknowledged, since the only course proposed is an indeterminate "armistice" under armies of occupation.

Machine production cannot be developed or sustained in any planned economy, even in peacetime, because the dynamo operates on a very long circuit of energy, the connections being made by free exchange. The first charge upon any energy circuit must be for maintenance and replacement throughout the complete circuit. This is obvious in a local energy circuit, where it is a plain question of the producer getting food and clothes and shelter out of his product; even though slave labor is used, the most brutal master can hardly deceive himself into the belief that a slave can continue working if his rations are inadequate to sustain life. But the long circuit is a money economy; and apparently many men do imagine that they can abstract a little more and a little more energy from the money transmission line without consequences to the continuing flow. The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly. But military force consists of energy drawn from production, and yielding no return. Then if the level of general production is lowered, the head of power must be correspondingly lessened. Energy flowing through the channels of private civilian life is self-sustaining, self-augmenting, and selfrenewing. Energy flowing into the military chan27O THE GOD OF THE MACHINE nel is used up; it produces nothing, not even maintenance of its own transmission lines. An army may occasionally seize supplies from the enemy, in loot or indemnities, but these are quickly consumed.

Therefore long-term military effectiveness, the survival of a nation through the recurrent hazards of war, generation after generation—and that is what a nation must do if it is to survive at all—depends absolutely on the preservation of capital resources, taking off only the surplus for military use as an endproduct. It is doubtful if capital can safely be depleted at all; the superficial appearance is not to be trusted in this respect, for it will be found, on examination of the record, that nations of long survival have never permitted their capital to be impaired even in their greatest military exertions. What they really did was to increase general production. In the Napoleonic wars, it is estimated that the British came through with general froduction fifty per cent higher than when they went in. Napoleon tried to embargo Europe, while the British traded with anyone who would trade, including the French themselves. In the American Civil War, the North certainly increased its general production; while the South insanely began the war by laying an embargo on its own cotton, thus paralyzing Southern credit abroad.

The present day theory that "sacrifices" will win a war is the ultimate of irrationality. When a motor truck is needed, one cannot ride around in a sacrifice. The object must be produced, and it can be produced only on the complete circuit, with free men using private property freely. If war takes more than the surplus production over a given length of time, even an unbroken series of victories must bring the nation ever nearer to irremediable defeat, on the ultimate cessation of supplies. The mistake of a nation which makes war at capital cost, thinking to win before its reserves are exhausted, is that it has undertaken an incalculable expenditure from a limited quantity. It has cut off the dynamo and is running on the battery; THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 271 but the power in a battery is a fixed quantity, while the future time a war will last, and the consequent expenditure of energy it will call for through time, can never be known in advance. The one certainty is the ratio which such calculations ignore, the fact that if capital is being depleted, more energy taken from the circuit than it produces in surplus, it is a losing formula 5 the nation must constantly become weaker. If the military force is no more than the surplus energy provides, it is at least a permanent power, extending to infinity, and can therefore hold out for ultimate victory over an indefinite period.

Time is on the side of the nation which increases its general production. Time is neutral to the nation which maintains general production at its previous level. Time is mortal to the nation which fights on its capital resources. Consequently, with a high energy system, the one thing that must make ultimate victory impossible would be the organization of the whole nation as a military establishment, thus withdrawing it from production. The manufacture of war materials does not constitute a production circuit \ they are nothing but endproduct. Incidentally, such a military organization will even conflict with itself internally, on the question of where the energy is to be expropriated from the personnel and materials existing at the time it takes over. The "obscure problem" has been completely overlooked j and the "apparent problem" splits into a dozen fallacious problems. This can be understood only if the obscure problem is defined, the real military necessity.* The real military problem of a nation is to -find where the energy for war should be taken of the circuit to obtain the maximum sustained striking force in the end affliance. The dynamo functions on a very long and complex system of transmission lines, from raw material sources to the focal points, *The distinction between an "apparent problem," that is, a misleading superficial symptom or effect, and the real, "obscure problem," which is the cause, was drawn by Mr. Charles F. Kettering.

272 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE tributaries feeding into trunk lines, to be redistributed in endproducts. Power is stepped-up all along the line. And it is not simply a geometrical progression, a multiple of manpower, at the end j it is a transcendent power. For convenience in viewing the real problem, let it be assumed that one hundred men * in general production can provide their own subsistence, and over and above that, a surplus sufficient to provide the sustenance of one hundred more men with the machinery, materials, and everything necessary to make an airplane of the maximum speed or cruising range, equipped with the maximum armament 5 and to keep that plane in the air during its effective term of use. So there are two hundred men altogether employed in both the main production circuit and the end production circuit, at the end of which a plane is made available for military use. But once the plane is made, equipped, and in operation, the whole number of men employed throughout the process, with the raw materials they used, would be wholly defenseless against the weapon they have made, with its small trained crew. The machine they have made is not merely a multiple of their natural power 5 it transcends the power that went into it. All of their military effectiveness for modern war has gone into that plane, because they work on the high potential long circuit of energy.

The maximum sustained striking force available from a high energy system, a free economy using its own weapons, is infinitely greater than a simple sum by addition or even a multiple of the manpower of the nation. If the two hundred men engaged in the whole process of which the plane is an endproduct were taken out of the production line and sent to the front, the strength of two hundred men would not be •The subsistence of men in production must include the subsistence of everyone incidentally engaged throughout the economy with their families or other dependents. But subsistence for high production also means maintenance and replacement and improvement of the capital assets of the nation—machinery, buildings, farm equipment, livestock and reserve supplies of all kinds, incidental to the system.

THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 273 added to the army. On the contrary, the striking force they had been supplying would be completely lost, ceasing altogether. Thus the ratio or percentage of men useful in an army for a high energy nation, to obtain the maximum sustained striking force, is very much less, in proportion to the simple manpower of the nation, than it would be with a lower energy system. The higher the potential of energy used in the production system, the smaller the army should be in proponion to the simple manpower of the nation. If it does take two hundred men to produce the transcendent power for ten men to use in the endappliance on the fighting line, then only five per cent of the national manpower can be effective in the armed forces. To take more than that percentage of men is to weaken the striking force by inverse ratio.* But that is what conscription does, taking simple manpower in vast numbers, which means expropriating the energy of the nation precisely at the level where it is ineffective for war, and wasting it to an incalculable extent. The theory of "total war,"

which must signify general conscription and a "planned economy," with the whole working power of the nation under restrictions and prohibitions, tied to assigned jobs or moved about arbitrarily, cuts the production line at the source. The * No implication is intended here that airplanes alone constitute a complete effective military force for a high energy nation. The dynamo is the product and means of production of the private property free enterprise capitalist economy. It affords the highest known potential and flow of energy; consequently it has made possible the invention of armament—battleships, tanks, artillery, bombs, airplanes— of unprecedented force, speed, and range. Varying conditions and circumstances must determine the most effective combination, proportion, and dominant or auxiliary relation of these different forms of armament, with the concomitant personnel or military manpower. This is necessarily a matter for judgment by the political and military authorities. They will not be infallible, but the authority must be confided to them because that is the only place it can rest. The airplane is mentioned here as the latest development of the transcendent power in war, but not as excluding the use of other armament. So far, it can only be said that the airplane is indicated as peculiarly adapted, by its speed, for the protection of the lines of a long circuit of energy. It is also the armament of a peaceful nation, since by itself it is not a means of conquest but of defense and proper reprisal.

274 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE transcendent power from general production can be obtained only by free men choosing their own jobs of their own volition, for whatever reward the work will bring. The creative man must find for himself the place and employment in which he can function; he must have a continuous choice of what he will do with his faculties, his time and his means. If a man is put to forced labor, all that can be got out of him is his muscular power. If he is tied to an assigned job, all that can be got out of him is what the prescribed task permits. When he works as he chooses, finding for himself the market for his talent, there is absolutely no telling to what extent he may increase production. If Charles F. Kettering or Thomas Alva Edison or Henry Ford had been put to work digging ditches under duress, one could calculate approximately how much energy or work could have been got out of them. Left to their own devices, as they were, it is impossible to say how much energy they actually released into production. Likewise the money which accrued to them in salaries or profits, which gave them greater scope to try out whatever they had in mind, and went back into production through them, became an infinite or transcendent power 5 whereas an equal sum divided into day's wages for ordinary labor would have produced just that sum in energy. (If taken in taxes, and paid to government officials, all it does is to increase the dead load.) Hence the proposed limitation of salaries to productive men would be a serious restriction on high production -7 if they were cut low enough, the effect would be to stop high production altogether.

Now this incalculable or infinite possibility, the transcendent power, is needed even more urgently in war than in peace 5 but it cannot be made available unless men are free to find their own employment, and have private control of the means of 'production. Only when personal freedom and private property are unimpaired can general production increase during wartime, with a concomitant increase of the surplus available for military use. The lesson is that energy for military use must be taken off THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 275 the circuit only as endproduct, to attain the maximum sustained striking force. Further, a man is not in himself either a means or a product; his skill in a high technology is selfdeveloped ; therefore it can be made effectively available only of his own volition. Can men be conscripted and ordered to step into airplanes and fly? It is impossible. A high production system provides in civilian life most of the training for the use of high technology in war, just as it provides the inventions, the material, the machinery, and the organization for manufacturing high power armament, with the flow of energy to sustain the military forces; and these must be used on the same terms as they are created, that is, by a volunteer personnel, to obtain the maximum striking force. The most comprehensive and fatal error that can be made in war is to take off most of the nation's energy at the level of simple manpower and in money to be expended at the same level for subsistence of a mass army. Then there is nothing left to draw on but the stockpile of raw materials, the machinery of production in existence, which must wear out rapidly, and an inadequate remainder of production personnel who can only go on working on these depreciating capital assets until they are exhausted. That is what Europe has done.

A production system does not determine the moral relations of society. The moral relations create the production system. Free men created the dynamo; and it will not operate except in the private property, free enterprise society of contract. An army is not in correct relation to the civil order unless it is organized on the same moral principles. It is not true that "nobody wins a war." When a nation is attacked, though the cost of the war must be a loss, the nation that preserves itself and its institutions from destruction by defeating the enemy has won the war. A free economy invariably wins against a closed or status economy or "totalitarian state." But it must "fight as a jree economy. The destruction wrought by the dictator nations of Europe in the present war has given a wholly misleading impression 276 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE of the real problem involved in making war when the product of a high energy system is used. Those nations prepared for war by filling their storage batteries while they were still on the end of the great world circuit of energy created and maintained by the free economies. Russia contributed nothing to that system creatively. But there are gold mines in Russia; and Russia exported gold, sold bonds abroad, and also squeezed enough out of its own miserable subsistence economy —at the cost of actual starvation of its own populace—to exchange for machinery, and to hire technologists from the free economies. Germany inherited a technology, trained technologists, machinery, and industrial organization from its previous condition of comparative freedom. Germany also used every fraudulent device of currency inflation, huge loans obtained abroad, and foreign credit—deliberate embezzlement over a period of twenty years—to get goods produced by the free economies. Japan sold bonds abroad to buy armaments.* On these storage batteries of energy, Russia, Germany, and Japan plunged into war, and got some more supplies by loot. They are fighting on the reserves of Europe, produced by the previous free economy; and on the product of the American energy circuit. Going around the world both ways, the energy from America met itself at Stalingrad, in a short-circuit. American energy is still supplying Russia, and is its only effective force. In lesser quantity, American energy has also gone into China, to encounter American energy previously supplied to Japan. American energy has literally blown up the civilized world, because it was thrown into the political channels in Germany, Russia, and Japan.

The historic relation of Russia to Europe can be indicated only briefly, but it remains unchanged in the present war from what it has been during the past three hundred years. In the life of a nation, decentralization is the formula of duration; * The late Dwight Morrow related complacently how many Japanese bonds were sold in one California town! The energy transferred by those bonds came down in bombs at Pearl Harbor and Manila.

THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 277 but this may occur either by design, with a sound political structure, or by default, the complete absence of structure. Given certain conditions, nations of wide expanse may retain a more or less continuous entity by inertia. This is true of China and Russia. Both countries consist largely of vast plains, cut off from adjoining nations by natural barriers of mountain and desert, marsh and landlocked waters and northern ice. They are the end of the trade routes of the old world. Neither of them ever achieved political structure. Only the physical configuration, the plane surface, tended to bring the population of each country under monarchy by aggregation, as movable objects will roll together uneasily in a shallow bowl. Their economies were extremely localized, with only a thin trickle of trade. Up to the rise of the Muscovite monarchy, Russia was a loose aggregation of shifting and disconnected communities. The rural communities were pure democracies. In the old village communes "every question must be settled unanimously"; so dissentients were "belabored until they abandoned their opposition." (Such is the inherent contradiction of the democratic theory.) Barbarian incursions consolidated them under a despotism by pressure. But the central despotism had to leave the local economies to function autonomously, except for taxation.

When a nation with a higher energy system invades a large area containing only local rural economies or energy circuits, it encounters the problem of high energy dissipating in space. While Napoleon was conquering Europe, he could cut in his army on the energy circuit of the nations he occupied, by exacting money indemnities and using the money to draw on the civil production system. In Russia there was no way for him to cut his army in on the production line. The Russian civil population could not have supplied him if they had tried to 5 they did not have the necessary transport or general organization. Therefore Napoleon's army advanced rapidly to the end of its own supply line, and then halted, as a spent bullet falls to the ground.

278 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE In the present war the Germans have encountered the same space problem, and there was no way for them to solve it. They could not bring up enough supplies for their armies to advance indefinitely, because transport requirements increase by geometrical ratio; and they could not get adequate supplies out of the conquered territory. It has been said truly that the failure of Stalin's Five Year Plan ruined Hitler. Likewise Japan invaded China with borrowed energy from the free economies, but it could not get adequate supplies out of China to maintain its mechanized armies. When supplies from America were stopped by embargo, Japan must either withdraw from China at a loss, or declare war on the Western powers in order to seize the outpost supply stations of the Western energy circuit in the Orient, such as the Dutch oil wells and refineries in the East Indies. How long Japan can maintain its high energy military equipment while cut off from the Western production circuit is a question which could only be answered by specific knowledge of its replacement needs and of the raw materials seized. In the long run, the Japanese military power would certainly collapse, just as the machine equipment of Germany and Russia must wear out and pass into desuetude if either or both were permanently out of contact with free economies elsewhere. If freedom were extinguished everywhere in the world, the whole high energy production system must break down and cease to function. No despotism can maintain independently and indefinitely a machine economy or a mechanized army. But until the batteries are completely exhausted, a despotism can do enormous damage; and Japan is in a position to wreak such damage on the Orient and to some extent on the Western world with its present reserves. It is not negligible while it lasts. Nevertheless, all the fighting force of Jafan was drawn from the West.

Then if the free economies cut their own energy circuits internally by imposing the political power on production, from what source are they to draw the necessary energy to function and to fight? The United States cannot borrow, beg, copy, THE ENERGY CIRCUIT IN WARTIME 279 embezzle, or loot from any other nation in the world, whether for peace or for war. How then can America imitate the "totalitarian" nations? The thing is impossible. Freedom for Americans is not a luxury of peace, to be "sacrificed" in wartime. It is a necessity at all times, but above all in war -y then it becomes an instant matter of life or death.