ANNEXATION.
This country has many important duties to fulfil in the family of
nations, but annexation of other lands is not one of them.
The contrary opinion is sometimes expressed, but the sooner we sit down
upon it the less likely we are to neglect our own business.
Annexation is an old business, and sometimes it has been profitable; but
the nations who best understood it have but few of their old possessions
left, and they would get rid of some of these, if they could without
being laughed at.
What nations could we stand any fair chance of annexing? Perhaps Mexico,
Canada and some of the West India Islands. What could be done with them?
Nothing that, in the long run, would benefit us. What would they do with
us? They would merely introduce discordant elements that would not help
us a particle in making our own national position secure. Our country is
so large already that there are jarring interests making themselves felt
and known in Congress, in the press, in public opinion, and
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with all the efforts that have been made they are approaching solution
at so slow a rate that a number of the advocates of one side or the
other are discouraged and indignant. There are a great many brilliant
theories of what might be done by the annexation of this or that country
by the United States. But an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory, and
fortunately we have enough facts to keep us for a long time in
examination if we will take the pains.
The ancient nation called Rome was the champion annexer of the world.
She annexed every territory that it was possible for her soldiers to
reach, and at one time the entire world owed allegiance to Rome. It was
practical allegiance, too, because we read in the Gospel according to
St. Matthew that in the days of Augustus Cæsar there went out a decree
that all the world should be taxed. To collect taxes from annexed
countries is more than some modern nations have ever been able to do.
The military and political prestige of Rome was afterward strengthened
by religion. Rome ruled the souls as well as the bodies and estates of
men, but even the Holy Roman empire went to pieces.
Greece did a great deal of annexing in the days of Alexander, who
penetrated farther into the civilizations of the East than the legions
of the Cæsars ever did, but Greece to-day is a mere spot upon the map.
But it is not necessary to go so far back. The great colonizing and
annexing schemes of the world, when nation after nation became numerous
and free enough to compete with each other, began soon after the
discovery of America. Nearly every European power planted colonies in
some portions of the new world. Most of these powers exist and are
strong to-day. But where are their colonies? England has Canada to be
sure, simply because she does not know how to get rid of it. But Spain
has not a foot of ground upon the mainland of America, and holds her
island possessions by very uncertain tenure. Look at Cuba, “the
ever-faithful island,” as she is called, with the greatest extremity of
sarcasm. The majority of the inhabitants detest the mother country and
all the officials she sends out there, her taxes are paid grudgingly,
again and again a large minority of the inhabitants have struggled to
free themselves from the Spanish yoke, and the struggle will probably
continue in view of the illustrious examples set by Mexico and all the
South American republics. Perhaps you will say that Spain is a bankrupt
old brute. Well, that is not overstating the matter at all. But look
from Spain to Holland. The Dutch have not been cruel taskmasters. They
have planted a number of colonies, and their paternal government, if
characterized by thrift, has also been unstained by any of the cruelties
and brutalities which have made the name of Spain a synonym for
savagery. How many of Holland’s colonies remain in the possession of the
mother country? None of any consequence except the island of Java, and
Java is no longer a treasury for Holland.
France at one time had large colonial possessions. She owned nearly
one-half of the territory now embraced by the boundaries of the United
States and all of Canada beside. France has now a few insignificant
islands and some undesirable swamp-land in Africa, which is valuable
chiefly as a place to send military officers who are so ambitious at
home as to be somewhat troublesome. Sweden has no colonies at all.
Denmark has two or three little islands near the Equator, and has an
elephant on her hands in the shape of Iceland.
But, you say that England is an exception to all these relations. Well;
is she? Do facts and figures justify the assertion? The most peaceable
portion of the British empire at the present time is the Dominion of
Canada. Canada gives England absolutely no trouble on her own part.
Australia is about as good. But of what use is either country to England
except as a resort for dissatisfied Englishmen who wish to begin life
anew somewhere else?--an opportunity which they could have equally well
if England didn’t own a particle of soil outside the British islands.
But England has a large empire in the East. She holds nearly all of
India. Yes; but how does she hold it? Some of it by absolute possession,
and a great deal through protectorates and treaties, through intrigues
with native princes and by other means which the people of the United
States would think beneath the dignity of our own country to exercise
anywhere else. We know what happened in India a few years ago when great
masses of people rose against English rule, and gave us the most
horrible details of war that this century has ever heard of. England’s
unrest and uneasiness about her possessions in India can be seen by any
one who reads the English newspapers or magazines or reviews. Some phase
or other of the Indian question is continually popping up, and there
never is anything in it to pacify the national unrest as to the future
of the two countries. The possibility of assimilation of the population
of India and England is laughed at by Englishmen of all degrees. Britons
will not live in India unless they are compelled to do so, and also
coaxed by compensation such as Englishmen never expect to receive at
home. Even in the days of “John Company” it was impossible to keep an
army there without double pay. I am not certain about the private
soldiers, but the officers received their pay from the home government
and an equal amount from the company, and even then the majority of
them were discontented.
As for the natives liking England or English habits or English customs,
it would be unreasonable to expect it, even did not facts prove that it
is impossible. Native Indians of wealth and intelligence frequently
visit England but very few remain. What is called the superior
civilization of the West has no charms for them. And they don’t take
English customs and principles home with them to disseminate among their
own class and the orders beneath it. Many intelligent natives will admit
that portions of the country are better ruled than they were under the
native princes a hundred or more years ago. But at heart the feeling is
that the old ways, if not the best, are certainly the most desirable and
the most fitted to the nature of the people. England is in chronic fear
of uprisings and disturbances. Her most statesmanlike public officials
and her ablest soldiers are sent to India; not enough of them can be
spared even to cross the channel to Ireland.
And, speaking of Ireland, which is another of Great Britain’s
annexations, is there a more prominent and damning disgrace existing in
the name of any civilized government of the world? It is not necessary
to go over the Irish question at all. Every man knows enough about it to
know that England’s rule of Ireland has been an entire and disgraceful
failure, and that with ample opportunities for colonization, for
maintaining military establishments, for pacifying the people, England
has persistently and continuously failed to make Ireland anything but a
hot-bed of hatred.
Where England is at peace with her colonies, what price does she pay?
Why, she simply makes them almost absolutely independent of the home
government. Except nominal allegiance to the mother country and the
acceptance of a viceroy, governor-general, or representative of the
throne by some title or other, these countries are almost as free of
England as the United States. They have their own parliaments, elect
their own officials, make their own laws, assess their own taxes, and
even perpetrate huge tariff lists, under which the products of the
mother country are obliged to pay handsomely for being admitted at all.
The only bond between Canada or Australia and England is one of
affection to the mother country. This sometimes endures to the second
generation, but there is precious little of it in the third. You can
easily enough find that out for yourself by going up to Canada and
becoming acquainted in almost any town in the Dominion. It seems
farcical, but it is nevertheless a fact, that the best English citizens
in Canada are Frenchmen, descendants of the original settlers who fought
England furiously and often successfully for more than a hundred years.
And the only ground for the loyalty of these people is apparently that
there is no other place for them to go, and no way to take with them
what little they possess.
Australia is just as independent as Canada. If she should attempt to
secede and declare herself as independent as she really is, England
would probably send down fleets and armies, and there would be war for a
long time, with the same result in the end that followed the attempt to
change the opinions of the thirteen colonies who organized this nation
of ours. England’s rule of the United States certainly was not severe.
Now that the spirit of the Revolution has been watered out through two
or three generations, it is perfectly safe to admit that England never
took as much money out of this country as she put into it. So, regarded
as a business enterprise, annexation or colonization did not pay here.
As soon as she began to demand taxes from the colonies the revolt began.
The question of her moral right is one that is not discussed now.
Discussion would not do any good. But if taxes cannot be levied upon a
colony or an annexed country, of what possible service is the new land
to the old?
Well, what is our lesson from all this? What would be the result of our
annexing either Mexico, Canada, or Cuba, for instance, to say nothing
of the small republics in the Caribbean Sea and in Central America,
toward which some of our demagogues have occasionally pretended to cast
longing eyes, and found a few fools to encourage them in doing so? It
would be utterly impossible under the spirit of our institutions for us
to treat any such land as a conquered country. The Declaration of
Independence would have to be completely overturned before we could
consistently enter upon any such custom. The most that we could do would
be to admit these countries as portions of the Union. We would scarcely
pretend to obtain them by force for this purpose, but if we were to want
to get them peaceably, what would be the only method? Why, by granting
them equal rights with our own citizens. Successful annexation would
depend upon the acquiescence of the majority of the inhabitants of the
countries alluded to. These people, like people everywhere else, have
leaders of their own. All leaders have aspirations and personal
ambitions, and personal pockets which never are sufficiently full. We
would have to provide for them first before we could be certain of the
people. We would be obliged to divide each country into States bearing
some proportion of population to those which we already have. We would
be obliged to give them representation in both Houses of Congress,
provide judicial systems for them, and in every way recognize them as
our equals.
Now, the truth is, no sane American believes the people of any of those
countries to be equal to those of our own. There are intelligent
Mexicans and Cubans and Canadians, but we as a body have very little
respect for the general run of people in those countries; no more
respect than their own rulers have, and that is very little. Some
exception must be made in the case of Canada, which is inhabited, so far
as the whites are concerned, mainly by intelligent people. But Mexico,
according to its own statesmen and according to all travellers who have
been in it, is practically a semi-civilized country. The most of the
inhabitants are deplorably ignorant. Freedom of ballot is an utter
farce. Law is a matter of barter, and life and property, while nominally
secure, are frequently threatened by uprisings which no local government
has yet been able to promptly suppress, and which certainly could not be
suppressed by a central government three thousand miles away with an
army of the conventional size of that of the United States.
Cuba is worse than Mexico rather than better. Cuba has been in a
condition of discontent and disturbance for so long that there are but
few portions of the island on which life and property are safe. The
majority of the voters can be purchased at any election time for a very
small outlay of money or rum, and the same purchased voters could be
persuaded by similar means to rise within a week against the newly
elected authorities, even if all happened to be their own candidates for
office. The class of representatives which Cuba would be obliged to send
to Washington could not possibly be expected to have any interest in
national legislation except such as pertained to their own portion of
the land. They have no sympathies of any sort with any portion of the
people or industries or aspirations of the United States. It would be
unfair to expect it of them. By birth and tradition they are radically
different from us. Their isolation from us would be none the less even
were they part of our country, and the consequence would be an alien
class, demanding everything and yielding nothing, exactly what would be
the case were we to annex Mexico.
Canada may drift to us in time. Some statesmen on both sides of the line
regard this as inevitable. Well, what must be will be. But before any
such marriage of nations there ought to be a long courtship between the
parties. At present there is no love whatever between them, and until
there is a marked change in this respect the union would be too utterly
selfish on each side to be safe for either. We want some things from
Canada, it is true. We have used up most of our visible supply of
standing timber, and we could find enough in Canada for a century to
come to make up for all deficiencies. But what else would we get? Very
little. We assume that Canada will buy a great deal from us. But it does
not seem to occur to the majority of our people that Canada is not a
large purchasing country. Canada has not only no rich class, as we
regard the expression, but her well-to-do class is poor, and the
majority of her people are not only very poor, but have very few needs
and demands to be supplied even had they unlimited means. The French
Canadians, who are probably the most industrious of the population, live
more plainly than any American would believe until he had travelled in
the country largely. They are so poor that they regard themselves in
paradise financially when they can find occupation upon American fishing
vessels and in American factories. The pay of factory hands in the
Eastern States is very small, as the trades’ unions have informed us
frequently and without any exaggeration, but it is infinitely better
than anything that the young men and young women of Lower Canada could
find at home. The home of the French Canadian, who seems to be entirely
contented, contains so little furniture that to the poor mechanic of a
Northern city it would seem very bare and empty. The farming population
of English birth is better off, lives better and has broader and more
expensive tastes. But it is one thing to have tastes and quite a
different thing to have the means to gratify them. The means would not
be any greater if those people were citizens of the United States than
they are now.
One thing we would receive in bountiful measure from Canada were we to
annex her, and that is debt. She is loaded with debt in proportion to
the assessed value of everything within her borders about five times as
heavily as the United States, and let no one imagine that the Canadian
is going to be fool enough to become part of our country and pay a
proportion of our debts without having her own debts paid by us. The
Canadian debt and ours would have to be amalgamated, with the result
that each individual taxpayer of the United States would have to take a
share in paying, literally paying, for Canada.
I know that a great deal is said about the vexatious questions that
would be entirely disposed of were Canada to become part of this Union.
But would we really get rid of them? All of the territory to the north
of us is not strictly Canadian. Some of it still belongs to England, and
even if England were quite willing to be entirely rid of the Dominion,
she would keep a foothold here if only for the purpose of having a
source of food supply from the fisheries. Nearly two hundred years ago,
when the British islands were nowhere near as populous as at present,
and the sea yielded a bountiful harvest all along the British coast,
England fought France savagely on the fisheries question, and America
so fully sympathized with her as to assist her to the best of her
ability. So, as long as England is anywhere on our border, it would be
useless to imagine ourselves rid of her as a possible enemy. She could
concentrate troops and munitions of war quite as easily upon any large
island or point of the upper half of North America as she can in Canada.
She might not be quite so near our border or have so many opportunities
for crossing, but she would be far enough away for us not to be able to
watch her so closely.
The only purposes of annexation, now that men are no longer stolen and
killed for the nominal reason that we wish to make Christians of them,
are to get something worth having for its own sake or to find a place of
overflow for surplus population. None of our neighbors are rich except
in debt. They have nothing we want which we cannot get cheaper by
purchase than at the expense of time, money and patience that even
peaceable annexation would require.
As for receptacles of overflow, we already have enough to last us a
century or two. Do not take any stock in the story that there is no more
government land worth having, and that there are no more chances for the
poor man in the United States. I know that such stories are told
frequently by those who are supposed to know most about it. The younger
men of the farming communities of the West, some thousands of them,
have been howling for years to be allowed to enter the so-called
territory of Oklahoma. But if to each of the majority of these men were
given a quarter section of land in the Garden of Paradise as it existed
before the fall of Adam, they would still be looking out for some new
location. There is a great floating, discontented mass of people in the
new countries. The proportion is quite as great as it is in the large
cities. There are many farmers in the West who have occupied half a
dozen different homesteads on pre-emption claims in succession, turned
up a little ground, built some sort of house which never was finished,
become discouraged or disheartened or restless, sold out at a loss or
abandoned their claims, put their portable property in a wagon or boat
and started in search of some new country. Their impulse seems to be
exactly that of the small boy who is out fishing. He always seems to
think the fish will bite better a little further on, either up or down
the stream, it does not matter which, and he rambles from one to the
other because rambling is a great deal easier work than fishing. The
unsurveyed territory of the United States is still enormous. Between the
city of New York and the Ohio river there are still hundreds of
thousands of acres of good land which never echoed the sound of the
lumberman’s axe nor heard the ploughman’s whistle or oath.
Several years ago the president of a prominent railway corporation, a
trunk line, said to me that there were hundreds of miles of his
company’s land which never contributed in any way to the support of the
road. It produced nothing, and scarcely anything was carried over the
road to it. And he wanted to know if I could give him any possible
reason why immigrants by hundreds went over the line to points a
thousand miles away when so much good land was awaiting tillage, and was
several hundred miles nearer markets than the country to which they were
going. I could not, except to suggest that it was human nature to
imagine that the places which were furtherest away offered the greatest
advantages.
Why, even in the State of New York, with its five or six million
inhabitants, there are large counties, and not in the Adirondack region
either, of which not more than half the good land is under cultivation
to-day. The land is not bad, the distance from rail communication and
from markets is not great. Everything is more favorable to the settler
than in some portions of the Western States that are filling up rapidly,
and yet the immigrant passes all these localities and goes further away,
and he who already is there is often dissatisfied and anxious to sell
out and go somewhere apparently for no other purpose except to get a new
start. The hill countries of all the older States still contain immense
quantities of valuable ground which might be made to yield more
profitable crops per acre than anybody’s wheat-land in the most favored
sections of the United States. The ground that the State of Tennessee
some years ago placed upon the market at six cents an acre so as to have
it in personal instead of public possession, and with the hope of
getting a little something out of it in the way of taxes, is as good as
many of the more valuable portions of the Eastern States. The entire
table-land of the mountain range that separates the Eastern States from
the West is but sparsely inhabited. Not much of it can be utilized for
large planting of staple crops, but all of it is valuable for something
that might be turned to profit. It is better ground than the Switzers
live well on in their native country and far better naturally than that
of some of the more prosperous provinces of France. On the basis of the
population of the State of New York, which State certainly is not
overcrowded in its agricultural districts, this nation has room for all
people who will be born in it or who by any possibility can immigrate to
it for two or three centuries to come.
We need no place of overflow for any of our population that is not
criminal, and this class can be trusted to find its own outlets and
places of refuge without any assistance from the government or the
people.
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