PART III

Produced by Al Haines

AMERICAN WORLD POLICIES

BY

WALTER E. WEYL

AUTHOR OF "THE NEW DEMOCRACY," ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1917.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK -- BOSTON -- CHICAGO -- DALLAS

ATLANTA -- SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON -- BOMBAY -- CALCUTTA -- MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

OUR IDEALISTIC PAST

CHAPTER PAGE

I AMERICA AMONG THE NATIONS . . . . . . . . . . 1

II THE SKELETON OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

III PEACE WITHOUT EFFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

IV AN UNRIPE IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

V FACING OUTWARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

PART II

THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM

VI THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD . . . . . . . . . 75

VII THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . . . . 85

VIII IMPERIALISM AND WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

IX INDUSTRIAL INVASION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

X THE REVOLT AGAINST IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . 126

XI THE APPEAL OF IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . . . 140

XII THE AMERICAN DECISION . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

PART III

TOWARDS ECONOMIC INTERNATIONALISM

XIII NATURAL RESOURCES AND PEACE . . . . . . . . . 169

XIV AN ANTIDOTE TO IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . . . 186

XV AMERICAN INTERESTS ABROAD . . . . . . . . . . 201

XVI PACIFISM STATIC AND DYNAMIC . . . . . . . . . 217

XVII TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT . . . . . . . 231

XVIII THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS . . . . . . . . . . . 246

XIX THE HIGHER IMPERIALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

XX THE FORCES OF INTERNATIONALISM . . . . . . . . 270

XXI AN IMMEDIATE PROGRAMME . . . . . . . . . . . . 288

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

{1}

PART I

OUR IDEALISTIC PAST

AMERICAN WORLD POLICIES

CHAPTER I

AMERICA AMONG THE NATIONS

The Great War has thrown America back upon itself. It has come as a

test and challenge to all our theories. Suddenly, yet subtly, it has

shaken our optimism and undermined our faith in the peaceful progress

of humanity. Our isolation is gone, and with it our sense of security

and self-direction. Americans, who a few days ago would have dared to

abolish army and navy as a supreme earnest of good faith, reluctantly

agree to arm. "Self-defence," they now say, "comes before progress.

We must lay aside our hopes of a world at peace and must guard our

gates."

Doubtless there is some exaggeration in our change of mood. Men speak

as though a miracle had swept away the Atlantic Ocean, leaving us

stranded on Europe's western shore. Fortunately the Ocean, always

America's ally, still lies there, narrowed and curbed, yet three

thousand miles of storm-swept water. Physically and morally, however,

our isolation has dwindled. Dreadnaughts, submarines and airships can

now reach us and our commerce, industry and national ambitions are

interwoven with those of Europe. We shall never again stand aloof from

the world.

{2}

To Americans this change has come so suddenly, though it has been long

preparing, that we fail to visualise the new situation. We glibly

repeat that our isolation is gone, but do not ask ourselves what is the

nature of the bond that has ended our isolation. Is it amity or

enmity? Are we to become one of a dozen clutching, struggling,

fighting nations, seeking to destroy each other, or are we to

contribute to a solution of the problems that now divide nations into

warring groups? Though our isolation is gone, we still preserve a

latitude of action. We may choose between two foreign policies,

between Nationalistic Imperialism and Internationalism. We may elect

to fight for our share of the world's spoils or to labour, and, if

necessary, to fight for a world peace and for just international

relations, upon which alone a permanent peace can be based.

Such a choice involves for Americans the main trend of our

civilisation; for Europe it is hardly less vital. Our influence upon

Europe, like hers upon us, has grown with the shrinking of the earth's

surface. Our bulk, our resources and our remnant of inaccessibility

give us a weight in world affairs far in excess of our military power.

We are advancing in population, wealth and general education, and our

future progress in these directions is likely to be more rapid than

that of Western Europe. Moreover we are the only strong nation not

tied up in existing international enmities. Our hands are unbound.

How we shall act, therefore, whether we shall add to the complications

of Europe or aid in disentangling them, is a world as well as a

national problem.

In the main such national determinations are dependent upon great

economic forces, acting upon the nation from within and without. These

economic forces, however, do not work upon stones but upon those loose

bundles of {3} instincts, reactions, ideals and prejudices that we call

men. We need not dig deep into American history to uncover the human

elements that will influence our decision. On the surface of our life

appear two strong tendencies pulling in opposite directions.

It is easier to describe than to define these tendencies. The first we

might perhaps call pacifism, liberalism, humanitarianism, democracy,

though none of these words exactly defines the generous, somewhat

ineffectual, peace ideal, which has grown up in a democratic people

with no hostile neighbours. At this moment by the light of the

European camp-fires we are likely to belittle this easy do-nothing

idealism. We find our idealists prosaic. They are not gaunt fanatics

consumed by their own passion, but hard-working, self-respecting,

religiously inclined men, asking good prices and high wages, eating

good food, wearing good clothes and perhaps running a Ford automobile.

To some of these meliorists, Europe seems almost as distant as China,

but towards the peoples of both places they preserve a vague and

benevolent missionary attitude. They want peace with Europe and peace

for Europe, and would even be willing to pay for it, as they pay for

relief for Belgium and Martinique. There is little passion in this

good-will but there is even less hypocrisy. One may ridicule this

cornfed, tepid idealism, but it is none the less the raw material out

of which great national purposes are formed. The present desire of

Americans for a world peace is no vaguer or more ineffectual than was

the seemingly faint sense of the wickedness of slavery, as it existed

in our Northern States in the days of the Missouri Compromise. Yet out

of that undirected, crude and luke-warm emotion, there burst forth

within a generation the white-hot flame, which consumed the detested

institution and freed the millions of Negro slaves.

{4}

But not all Americans are idealists even of this commonplace sort. In

our ultra-keen capitalistic competition we have evolved an American of

different type. Self-centred, speculative, narrow, measuring success

by the dollars gained and spent, this individualist has a short way

with idealisms and larger ends. To him our involuntary _rapprochement_

with Europe is an opportunity not for service but for gain. War is

good or bad as it is profitable or the reverse. He is a realist, as is

the mole, attached to the earth and not worrying about the skies. His

ideal is that of a selfish nation dominated by selfish, social classes.

Here then we have the two Americanisms, both of them native and

redolent of the soil, both vital and growing. Both have appeared in

many of our national controversies, in the Philippine question, in

Porto Rico, in our relations with Mexico. The one is liberal,

democratic, often visionary, though confident because many of its

visions have come true; the other is concrete, short-sighted, intense

but with a low moral sensibility. Each appeals to a patriotism formed

in the image of the patriot.

It is upon this divided America that there comes the sense of the

impinging of Europe. These men of two opposed types (with innumerable

intermediate variations) suddenly perceive that the great war is being

fought not only near our shores but even within our borders. They

dimly perceive that the war is but an incident in a greater, though

less spectacular contest, that it is in reality a phase of a long

drawn-out economic struggle in which we too have blindly played our

part. To both groups, to all Americans, the war comes close. It is

being fought with motives like our motives and ideals like our ideals.

It is a conflict which proves to us that international peace is still

very far from attainment. War on a scale never before known:

war--deliberate, organised, scientific--fought {5} by combatants and

noncombatants alike, reveals itself as one of the central facts of our

modern life, a fact not to be ignored or preached or argued away, a

fact which for us on this side of the ocean, whatever our instincts and

our philosophies, has its deep and permanent significance. Our changed

relation to this central fact of war constitutes one of the gravest

problems that we face to-day. Growing up in a peaceful environment we

had imbibed the idea that war was a thing alien to us, monarchial,

European. We had come to hold that a nation could avoid war by not

desiring it, by not preparing for it, by minding its own business. We

believed that what share in the world we had and wanted was what every

reasonable nation would willingly concede us, and if certain powers

proved refractory and unreasonable--a most improbable contingency--we

could always send forth our millions of minute men, armed with

patriotism and fowling-pieces. With European conflicts we had no

concern; we might deplore the senseless brutality of such wars, but

need not take part in their conduct or in their prevention. In due

course Europe would learn from America the lessons of republicanism,

federalism and international justice and the happiness and wisdom of an

unarmed peace. Ourselves unarmed, we could peacefully wrest the

weapons from Europe's hand.

The sheer, unthinking optimism of this earlier American attitude ended

abruptly on the outbreak of the present war. It is not surprising that

our first reaction towards this war, after its full sweep and

destructiveness were visible, was one of fear. If a peaceful nation

like Belgium could suddenly be overrun and destroyed, it behooved us

also to place ourselves on guard, to be ready with men and ships to

repel a similarly wanton attack. The result was a demand for

preparedness, an instinctive demand, {6} not based on any definite

conception of a national policy, but intended merely to meet a

possible, not clearly foreseen, contingency. The whole preparedness

controversy revealed this rootlessness. It was in part at least an

acrid discussion between careless optimists and unreasonable

scare-mongers, between men who held positions no longer tenable and

others who were moving to positions which they could not locate. Our

ideas were in flux. Whether we should arm, against whom we should arm,

how we should arm, was decided by the impact of prejudices and shadowy

fears against an obstinate and optimistic credulity.

Nothing was more significant of the externality of these debates than

the fact that they seemed to ignore everything that we had cared about

before. The case for armament was presented not as a continuation of

earlier national policies but as a sort of historical interlude. Past

interests were forgotten in the insistence upon the immediate. Until

the war broke in upon us we had been groping, both in foreign and

domestic policies, towards certain forms of national expression;

arbitration, international justice, democracy, social reform.

Throughout a century, we had believed that we had blundered towards

these goals, and that our history revealed an aspiration approaching

fulfilment. We had settled a continent, built an ordered society, and

amid a mass of self-created entanglements, were striving to erect a new

civilisation upon the basis of a changed economic life. Now it was

assumed that all this stubbornly contested progress was forever ended

by the conflict engulfing the world.

This whole idealistic phase of American life was disparaged by our

sudden ultra-patriots. These men, with a perhaps unconscious bias,

opposed their brand new martial idealism to what they falsely believed

was a purely {7} materialistic pacifism. Actually both advocates and

opponents of increased armaments were contending under the stress of a

new and bewildering emotion. For decades we had concerned ourselves

with our own affairs, undisturbed by events which convulsed Europe.

But the present war, because of its magnitude and nearness, had set our

nerves jangling, excited us morbidly, dulled us to horror and made us

oversensitive to dread. We read of slaughter, maiming, rape and

translated the facts of Belgium and Servia into imaginary atrocities

committed against ourselves. We wanted to be "doing something." Not

that we wished war, but rather the chance to rank high according to the

standards in vogue at the hour. While hating the war, we had

insensibly imbibed the mental quality of the men who were fighting. We

were tending to think as though all future history were to be one

continuing cataclysm.

For the moment, like the rest of the world, we were hypnotised. Upon

our minds a crude picture had been stamped. We were more conscious of

peril than before the war, though the peril was now less. Our

immediate danger from invasion was smaller than it had been in June,

1914; yet while we were perhaps foolishly unafraid in 1914, in 1916 we

trembled hypnotically.

It was to this state of the American mind that all sorts of appeals

were made. Those who wanted universal conscription and the greatest

navy in the world argued not only from dread of invaders but from the

necessity of a united nation. They wanted "Americanism," pure, simple,

undiluted, straight. There was to be no hyphen, no cleavage between

racial stocks, no line between sections or social classes. America was

to be racially, linguistically, sectionally one.

It was an ideal, good or bad, according to its {8} interpretation. A

more definitely integrated America, with a concrete forward-looking

internal and foreign policy, could aid disinterestedly in untying the

European tangle. In the main, however, the demand for Americanism took

on an aggressive, jingoistic, red-white-and-blue tinge. Out of it

arose an exaggerated change of mood toward the "hyphenate," the

American of foreign, and especially German, lineage. Newspapers teemed

with attacks upon this man of divided allegiance.

In other ways our agitation for a United America took a reactionary

shape. Though a pacific nation, we experienced a sudden revulsion

against pacifism and Hague tribunals, as though it were the pacifists

who had brought on the war. Contempt was expressed for our

industrialism, our many-tongued democracy, our policy of diplomatic

independence. Those most opposed to Prussianism, as it has been

defined, were most stubbornly Prussian in their proposals. We heard

praises of the supreme education of the German barracks, and a clamour

arose for universal service, not primarily industrial or educational

but military in character. A decaying patriotism of Americans was

deplored quite in the manner of Bernhardi. More than ever there was

talk of national honour, prestige, the rights of America. Our former

attitude of abstention from European disputes was called "provincial,"

and we were urged to fight for all manner of reasons and causes. Even

though we cravenly desired peace, we were to have no choice. An

impoverished Germany, beaten to her knees, was to pay her indemnity by

landing an army in New York and holding that city for ransom. Around

such futilities did many American minds play.

All this appeal would have been more convincing had it not been most

insistently urged by influential financial groups. The extent of

certain financial interests in large {9} armaments, in a spirited

foreign policy and in other widely advertised new doctrines, was

obvious. The war had built up a vast armament industry, war stocks had

been widely distributed, and upon the advent of peace these properties

would shrink in value unless America made purchases. More important

was the complex of financial interests, likely to be created in Latin

America and elsewhere. Speculators were dreaming of great foreign

investments for American capital. We were to become a creditor nation,

an imperialistic power, exploiting the backward countries of the globe.

We were to participate in international loans, more or less forced, and

to make money wherever the flag flew. For such a policy there was

needed the backing of a patriotic, united, disciplined and armed

nation, and to secure such arms, any excuse would suffice.

At the most, of course, these financial adventurers were merely leaders

in a movement that arose out of the peculiar conditions of the moment.

The roots of our sudden desire for armament and for an aggressive

foreign policy ran far deeper than the interests of any particular

financial group. A sense that American ideals were in peril of being

destroyed by a new barbarism impelled us to new efforts. We dimly

perceived that we must solve new problems, accept new responsibilities,

and acquit ourselves worthily in new crises.

The most obvious result of this campaign for preparedness was a largely

increased expenditure for armies and navies. Its deeper significance,

however, lay in the fact that it marked the end of our former theory

that war can be ended by precept and example and that no nation need

fear war or prepare for war so long as its intentions are good.

Hereafter the size and character of our national armament was to be

determined in relation to the possibility of war with Europe and of war

in Europe. The {10} campaign for military preparation is not ended.

It will not end until some relation is established between our new

armament and the national policy which that armament is to serve.

So long as these preparedness debates lasted we believed that the

fundamental cleavage in American sentiment was between those who wished

to arm and those who did not. Yet the proposal to increase the army

and navy was defended by men of varying temperaments and opinions, by

liberals and conservatives, by workmen and capitalists, by members of

peace societies and representatives of the Navy League. As the first

stage of mere instinctive arming passes, however, it suddenly appears

as though the true cleavage in American thought and feeling runs

perpendicular to the division between those who favour and those who

oppose armament. The real issue is the purpose to which the arms are

to be put. We may use our armed strength to secure concessions in

China or Mexico, to "punish" small nations, to enter the balance of

power of Europe or to aid in the promotion of international peace. We

may use our strength wisely or unwisely, for good or for ill. We began

to arm before we knew for what we were arming, before we had a national

policy, before we knew what we wanted or how to get it. Our problem

to-day is to determine upon that policy, to create out of the

constituent elements forming American public opinion a national policy,

determined by our situation and needs, limited by our power, and in

conformity with our ideals. It is the problem of adjusting American

policy to the central fact of international conflict and war.

As we approach this problem we discover that the two great elements in

our population tend to pull in contrary directions. In the question of

defence the one instinctively follows the lead of European nations,

piling up {11} armies and navies and attempting to make us the most

formidable power in the world; the second seeks by understandings with

other nations to prevent disagreements and to avert wars. The first

group emphasises American rights on "land and sea," the property rights

of Americans, our financial interests in backward countries, and the

military force necessary to secure our share; the second thinks of

establishing international relations in which such rights may be

secured to all nations without the constant threat of force. Both of

these elements are national in the sense that they desire to preserve

the country's interest, but while the first group envisages such

interest as separate and distinct from others, to be defended for

itself alone as a lawyer defends his client, the other sees the

national interest in relation to the interests of other nations and

seeks to secure international arrangements by which conflicting claims

can be adjusted. The first element lays stress upon the legalistic

attitude, upon our honour, our rights, our property; the second is less

jingoistic, less aggressive, less jealous in honour.

Which of these two elements in our population will secure the

ascendency and dictate our foreign policy, or which will contribute

more largely to the decision, will be determined chiefly by the course

of our internal evolution and especially by our economic development.

Whether we are to go into international affairs to get all we

can--concessions, monopolies, profits--will depend upon how great is

the internal economic strain pressing us outward, upon whether our

conditions are such that the gains from a selfish national

aggrandisement will outweigh the large, slow gains of international

co-operation. Ideals will also count, as will tradition and precedent.

Even chance enters into the decision. If, for example, by some change

in the internal affairs of Germany we are thrown into an alliance {12}

with England, France and Russia, a direction will be given to our

international policy which it may take years to change. The accident

which found Admiral Dewey in Asiatic waters on a certain day in April,

1898, has not been without its influence upon the ensuing foreign

policy of the United States.

For those who wish to use our armed forces to secure special advantages

(trade, monopolies, fields for investment), the road is broad and

clearly marked. They have only to do what other aggressive and

imperialistic nations have done--prepare the means of fighting and

threaten to fight either alone or with allies whenever a favouring

opportunity offers. But for those of us who desire to make America an

agency in the creation of international peace the problem is infinitely

more difficult. Peace and internationalism cannot be secured by

fervent wishes or piety but only by persistent effort and measureless

patience. That for which men have sought in vain during so many

centuries will not fall like ripe fruit into our laps.

Towards this goal of internationalism all that is best in America

aspires. The American tradition points towards internationalism. Our

early settlers, as also many of our later immigrants, came to these

shores to escape political and religious warfare, and brought with them

a broad humanitarian ideal, an ideal of peace, internationalism,

freedom and equality. They also brought an antipathy towards those

monarchical and aristocratic institutions, with which in America we

still associate conceptions of imperialism and war. The simplicity and

inherent equality of our frontier life, its self-government and its

local independence, tended to reinforce our leaning towards a peaceful

internationalism. Our large spaces, our ease of movement, our freedom

from the militaristic and excessively nationalistic traditions of the

European Continent {13} influenced us in a like direction, as did also

the merging of many peoples into one nation. We were not disillusioned

by any conflict with harder-pressed nations, desiring what we had or

having what we desired. We believed vaguely in an inevitable

beneficent internationalism, which would bring all nations into harmony

and banish war from the world.

Actually our pacifists and internationalists have accomplished little,

if anything, towards a realisation of this ideal. What has hampered

them, apart from the overwhelming difficulty of the problem, has been

the fact that they did not realise how distant was the goal towards

which they were marching. Their approach to the problem was not

realistic. They conceived of the World as a group of nations in all

fundamentals like America and of peace as a process by which these

other nations would approximate to the United States. The great

solvents of war were democracy, education and industrialism. Democracy

would take from the ruling classes the right to declare wars; education

would destroy in the people the last vestiges of bellicosity and

international prejudice, while industrialism would in the end overcome

militarism, and turn battleships and howitzers into steam-ploughs and

electric cranes. The triumphant progress throughout the world of

democracy, education and industrialism would speedily bring about peace

and a firm internationalism.

Unfortunately the problem of imperialism and war is far more intricate

than this popular theory assumes. All these forces tend perhaps in the

general direction of peace but they do not bring about peace

automatically and in many cases actually intensify and augment the

impulse towards war. Our present age of advancing democracy, education

and industrialism has been, above all other periods, the age of

imperialism, of exaggerated nationalism {14} and of colonial wars.

Democratic peoples have not been cured of nationalistic ambition, and

education, in many countries at least, has aided in the creation of an

imperialistic and militaristic spirit. Even our unguided industrialism

has not ended wars or brought their end perceptibly nearer. There is

no easy road to internationalism and peace, and those who strive for

these ends without understanding the genesis and deep lying causes of

war are striving in vain.

If in America therefore, we are to contribute to the promotion of

internationalism and peace, we must recognise that war is not a mere

accident or vagary but a living thing growing out of the deepest roots

of our economic life. It is not caused alone by human unreason, by the

pride of individuals, the greed of social classes, the prejudices of

races and nationalities, but is closely intertwined with those economic

ideals upon which the best as well as the worst in our civilisation is

reared. We had believed that industrialism and militarism were

mutually opposed and that the factory would automatically destroy the

army. To-day we see how each of these has entered into the spirit of

the other and how each helps the other. The army is industrialised and

the national industry is put upon a military, fighting basis. The same

forces that impel a nation to develop its trade, increase its output,

improve its industrial technique, also impel it to raise large armies

and to fight for the things for which men work. To divorce economic

ambition from the national aggression that leads to war will not be

easy. It is a sobering task which faces those who wish to use

America's influence in the cause of peace.

Whatever our course of action, however, whether we strive for an

American imperialism or for internationalism, one thing is certain: it

cannot be instinctive, fluctuating, {15} undirected. We cannot

revolutionise our international relations with each new administration

or with each change of the moon. Nor can we stay at home and, ignorant

of the causes of war, content ourselves with a long-distance preaching

of peace to the menaced nations of Europe. Each of the two courses

open to us involves self-direction, valour and strength. If we are to

enter upon a struggle for place, power and profits, we must prepare for

a dangerous contest: if we are to labour for a new international

harmony, for peace and good-will and the delicate adjustments without

which these are but words, we shall also need courage--and infinite

patience. Without knowledge we shall accomplish nothing. To enter

upon an international career without a sense of the conditions

underlying peace and war, is to walk in darkness along a dangerous path.

{16}

CHAPTER II

THE SKELETON OF WAR

To ascribe world events to the action of a single individual is a naive

yet persistent manner of thought. All over Europe men blamed the war

upon a wicked Kaiser, a swaggering, immature Crown Prince, a

weak-fisted Von Berchtold, a sinister Tisza, a childish Poincare, an

unscrupulous Sir Edward Grey, an abysmally astute Sasonof. We in

America blamed everything on Von Tirpitz and the irrepressible

Reventlow. In all countries, millions of men drifted helplessly toward

a war, which they believed was due to the evil machinations of a man.

So long as the belief holds that one man can set the world on fire,

there can be no reasonable theory of war or peace. It is a conception

which makes world destiny a plaything, unmotived in any large sense,

accidental and incalculable. On the other hand, those who regard war

as merely irrational, a general human idiocy, are equally far from any

true approach to the problem. We are being deluged to-day with books

and newspaper articles describing war as a reversion of mankind to a

lower type, a betrayal of reason, a futile, revolting struggle,

creating no rights, settling no problems and serving no useful purpose

except, in Lord Salisbury's phrase, "to teach people geography." Let

us be rational and adult, cry these authors, adjuring an insane world

to return to its sanity.

No wonder that there is prejudice against this particular variety of

abstract pacifism. It is a negative {17} doctrine, anaemic and

thin-haired, with a touch of gentle intolerance and a patient disregard

of facts. It does not recognise the real motives to war, upon which

alone a theory of peace may be based. It defeats itself because

ultra-rationalistic. For if war, though irrational, has always been,

would it not follow that man himself is irrational, that the fighting

instinct is deeper than reason, and that to-morrow, as to-day, men will

fight for the joy of killing? If this were true, pacifism might as

well resign. In truth, this interpretation of war as a mere expression

of man's fighting instincts is no more adequate than is the personal

devil theory. War has outgrown the fighting instinct. It has become

deliberate, businesslike, scientific. It demands sacrifices from those

to whom fighting is an abomination. How many red-blooded warriors

could the German Emperor or the French President have enrolled, had

there been no appeal to national interest, duty, justice, indignation?

War is won to-day by peace-loving men, who abhor the arms in their

hands.

The closer we study its motives, incentives and origins, the more

deeply do we find the elements of this problem imbedded in the very

foundations of national or group life. War depends upon growth in

population, emigration, the use of natural resources, agricultural

progress, trade development, distribution of wealth, taxation. It is

never unrelated to the economic web in which the people live their

lives; it is seldom unaffected by the necessity of expanding and the

opposition of neighbours, the desire for bread and the longing for

luxuries. War and peace are functions of the national life, steps in

national progress or retrogression. Peace and war are two paths

leading often in the same general direction, and whether we may take

one path or must take the other is often determined for us long before

we reach this parting of the ways.

{18}

At first glance this economic or business side of war is obscured. We

find tribes and nations fighting for women and heads and scalps, to

please the gods, to destroy sorcerers, to slay heretics, to show

prowess, and for other reasons which seem equally remote from an

economic motive. A nation will go to war "to save its face," or to

annihilate the "hereditary enemy," as well as to improve its position

in the world. Yet these diverse human motives are related to, though

not fully absorbed in, the omnipresent economic motive. The

"hereditary enemy" usually is no other than the tribe or nation that

blocks our way; the "gods" enjoin war against neighbours who occupy the

lands we need or can furnish us tribute; the women, whom we capture,

are tame and pleasant beasts of burden, who help to swell our numbers.

As for pride and tribal vanity, which so often precipitate war, these

are a powerful social bond, which by holding the tribe together permits

it to conquer the things it needs. A war for prestige is often a war

for economic gain once removed. There remains a residue of martial

emotion, not so closely united with the desire for economic gain, but

all these derivative motives do not prevent the economic factor from

remaining preponderant. Remove the economic factors leading to war,

give men more than enough, and the chief incentive to war disappears.

The modern historical trend has been towards a fuller recognition of

the influence of this potent, though often disguised, motive to war.

Historians are recognising that the mainspring of social action is not

an emperor's dream or soldier's ambition, but the demand of vast

populations for food, clothing and shelter, then for better food,

clothing and shelter, and finally for the rights, privileges and

institutions which will make such economic progress assured. Ancient

war, which seemed so empty and causeless, is now {19} revealed as a

half-conscious effort of human societies to adjust themselves to

changing economic conditions. It is a struggle for bread. Indeed, so

complete has been this change in our theories that we often exaggerate

this economic influence, and speak as though no emotion save hunger

impelled humanity. But such exclusion of other motives is not

necessary to an economic interpretation. We can emphasise the

influence of economic desires, which modern Americans and Germans share

with ancient Greeks and Babylonians, while still admitting the

influence of other factors. Race, creed, language, geographical

position, increase national friendship or animosity. While these

factors influence wars, however, they are less universal, if not less

potent than is the economic motive.

The significance of this economic motive to war can hardly be

overstated. If wars are in the main due to fundamental, economic

conflicts, then we cannot end or limit war unless we discover some

alternate way to compose such economic differences. We cannot hope

that the human race will stop wanting things. Men have never lived

like the lilies of the field, nor wished to live so. According to our

every-day morality, wanting and getting are ethical and wise, and

not-wanting is unethical and decivilising. Our whole intricate,

complex civilisation depends upon the physical well-being and the

economic ambition of our populations, and morally, as well as

physically, a beggared nation tends to decline. We may trace this

degeneration of impoverished groups in some of our mountainous

districts, where communities, shut off from the main productive

energies of the nation, brutalise and decay. All the conditions of our

life impel nations, like individuals, to advance economically, to

fructify labour, to gain. If, however, the nation in its struggle for

new wealth clashes with other nations, intent also upon gain, if {20}

these mobilised, economic ambitions necessarily lead to destructive

wars, then we must cease declaiming against war's immorality, and seek

instead to discover whether economic readjustments cannot circumscribe

or even prevent wars.

To a modern business man or to a city workman this theory of the

economic cause of wars is not unsatisfactory. He may quite properly

introduce more idealistic elements, a desire for independence, a love

of conquest, the influence of personal prejudices, dynastic

affiliations, racial antagonism and religious hatreds, but in the end

he will apply to this business of war the same canons of judgment that

he applies to his own business. "Whom does it pay? What is 'in it'

for the nations or for classes or individuals within the nations?" And

if you tell him that in the present war Servian hatred was intensified

because Austria discriminated against Servian pigs, or that Germany was

embittered because of Russian tariffs and French colonial policies, if

you speak to him in these economic terms, you are immediately

intelligible. Economic motive is one of the obvious facts of life.

It is the transcendentalists who interpret war in more idealistic

terms. In every country, but especially in Germany, there is a whole

school of historical and pseudo-historical romanticists, who defend war

by elevating it high above the reach of reason. You cannot shake the

convictions of such writers by an account of war atrocities, of

slaughter, pillage, rape, mutilations and the spitting of infants upon

lances, just as you cannot deter murderers by the sight of public

executions. All these horrors are but a part of war's terrible

fascination. "In war," writes the late Professor J. A. Cramb, one of

the most eloquent of these war mystics, "man values the power which it

affords to life of rising above life, the power which the spirit of man

possesses to pursue the ideal." There is, and can be, {21} in his

view, no reason for war; war transcends reason. In spite of its

unreason, war, which has always governed the world, always ruled the

lives of men, always uplifted the strong and deposed the weak, will

remain beautifully terrible, immortally young. As in ancient days, in

India, Babylon, Persia, China, Hellas and Rome, so to-day, men will

choose "to die greatly and with a glory that will surpass the glories

of the past." Men are always greater than the earthly considerations

that seem to guide their lives. As patriotism ruled the hosts of Rome

and Carthage, as the ideal of empire drove forth the valorous

Englishmen who conquered India, so to-day, to-morrow and until the end

of time high and noble ideas, far above the comprehension of mere

rationalists, will impel men to war, "to die greatly."

It may seem importunate to reason with men upon a subject which they

include among the mysteries, beyond reason. Yet if we analyse the

instances, which Professor Cramb and others cite of wars waged for

great ideal purposes, we stumble incontinently upon stark economic

motives. Carthage and Rome did not fight for glory but for food. The

prize was the fertile wheat fields of Sicily. There was nothing

transcendental in the wars between Athens and Sparta, but a naked

conflict for commerce and exploitative dominion. As for the British

conquest of India, the "ideal of empire" was perfectly translatable

into a very acute desire for trade.

We shall make little progress unless we understand this business or

economic side of war, for to see war truly we must see it naked. All

its romanticism is but the gold lace upon the dress uniform. The

idealism of the individual is a mere derivative of those crude

appetites of the mass that drive nations into the conflict. Wherever

we open the book of history, and read of marching and counter-marching,

of {22} slaughter and rapine, we discover that the tribes, clans,

cities or nations engaged in these bloody conflicts were not fighting

for nothing, whatever they themselves may have believed, but were

impelled in the main by the hope of securing economic goods--food,

lands, slaves, trade, money.

It is a wide digression from the immediate problems of our closely knit

world of to-day to the blind, animal instincts that ruled the destinies

of endless successions of hunting tribes, exterminating each other in

the savage forest. Yet among hunting tribes, at all times, the raw

conflict of economic motive, which we find more decently garbed in

modern days, appears crude and stark. To kill or starve is the eternal

choice. Since population increases faster than food, war becomes

inevitable, for the tribe that hunts on _our_ land, and eats _our_

food, is our hereditary enemy. To pastoral nations, war is equally

necessary, unless babies and old people are to be ruthlessly

sacrificed. To fill new mouths larger flocks are necessary, to feed

larger flocks new pastures are required; and there is only one way to

obtain fresh pastures. There comes a period of drought, and the

hunger-maddened nation, accompanied by its flocks, hurls itself

suddenly upon feebler agricultural peoples, destroying empires and

founding them. These are the great _Voelkerwanderungen_, the restless

migrations of mobile pastoral nations in search of food. It is the

eternal bloody quest.

Nor are agricultural populations immune. Not only must they defend

their patches of cultivated land, but, as numbers increase, must strike

out for new lands. When the growing population makes conditions

intolerable, youths are chosen, perhaps by religious rites, to

adventure, sword in hand, and carve out new territory or die fighting.

There are always more than there is place for, and it is always

possible for a young Fortinbras to shark up "a list of {23} lawless

resolutes for food and diet, to some enterprise that hath a stomach in

't." All the interminable battling of the early Middle Ages reveals

this effort of fecund agricultural populations to solve the problem of

over-breeding by slaughter.

Even the Crusades partake of this economic character. Among the

Crusaders were exalted souls, who wished to rescue their Lord's

sepulchre, but there were many more who dreamed of free lands, gold and

silver, and the beautiful women of the Orient. The religious motive

was present; it was strong and intolerant, though it did not in the

later Crusades prevent Christians from attacking Christians. At

bottom, however, certain strong economic factors forced on the

struggle. There had been famine in Lorraine and pestilence from

Flanders to Bohemia, and all the discontent, hunger and ambition of

western Europe answered to Urbano's call. "A stream of emigration set

towards the East, such as would in modern times flow towards a newly

discovered gold-field--a stream carrying in its turbid waters much

refuse, tramps and bankrupts, camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive

monks and escaped villains, and marked by the same motley grouping, the

same fever of life, the same alternations of affluence and beggary,

which mark the rush for a gold-field to-day."[1] Not until it was seen

that they no longer paid did the Crusades end; not heavenly but earthly

motives inspired most of these soldiers of Christ. It was business,

the business of a crudely organised, over-populated, agricultural

Europe.

Even with the development of commerce, the motive does not change in

character, though its form becomes different. All through history we

find maritime cities and states fighting for the control of trade

routes, the exploitation of {24} markets and peoples, the right to sell

goods and keep competitors from selling. Athens, Venice, Genoa, Pisa,

Florence, Holland, England--it is all the same story. Undoubtedly,

with the development of commerce, wealth takes a new form. Land is no

longer the sole wealth, and successful warriors need no longer be paid

in land and live off the land, as they are forced to do in every feudal

society. A money economy, a conversion of values into money, changes

the technique of war by creating professional mercenary armies. But

the business goes on as before. Rival groups fight for a monopoly of

trade as they once fought for land. There is still not enough to go

around, and no way of deciding between rival claimants except by the

arbitrament of war.

Perhaps it will be objected that an analysis of war such as this leaves

us merely with the dead body of facts while killing the soul of truth.

Surely, it may be urged, war is more than a sordid calculation; a

Roland or Bayard does not weigh his danger against booty. Of course

that is so. Economic motive is only the skeleton of war; the flesh and

skin are of a totally different texture. Idealism, nobility, heroism

exist in war, and are no less sincere because based upon the gross

facts of economic necessity and desire. Without such idealism,

manufactured or evolved, you can no more win wars, especially in these

latter days, than without ammunition. Idealism is a weapon with which

we kill our enemies. Yet if we read our history rightly, we shall find

less of this luminous nobility among warriors than our annalists

pretend. The Greeks of the Trojan War were not patriots but

free-booters. Those great English sailors, Drake, Morgan and the rest,

who ravaged the Caribbean and smashed the Spanish sea-power, were

pirates, unashamed of their piracy. As for the heroic warriors of the

Scotch border, would they not to-day be {25} jailed as cattle-thieves?

Look where you will, at the great wars and at the blood-tracked

colonising movements of history, and always you will find two kinds of

men: the stone-blind idealist, and the crass, open-eyed, fleshly man.

One fights for ideals, the other for something else worth fighting for.

Both, however, are in reality impelled by economic motive, working upon

them either directly and consciously, or transmuted into ideals through

the medium of a people's thought.

Nor does this fighting for things, to be obtained only by fighting,

involve moral turpitude. Nothing could be more grotesque than the

moralistic tone in which we industrious moderns lecture the ancient

fighting peoples. They did what we do, gained the things they wanted

in the only way they could. Men will fight or work rather than starve,

and whether they fight or work depends upon which, in the given

circumstances, is the feasible mode of accumulation. Perhaps these

peoples loved fighting and praised fighting more than we do. But as

fighting was their _metier_ and the measure of their success, their

minds, like their muscles, became habituated, and their morality

discovered virtue to be the thing at which the moralists were adept.

Nothing can be wrong that is necessary to survival. Warfare is not

immoral until there is an alternative.

Such an alternative might easily have arisen with the vast impetus

given to accumulation by the discovery of America and of the new route

to the East. But these events not only did not end but actually

intensified war, while bringing out more sharply its preponderatingly

economic character. For three generations Europe was enmeshed in the

Italian wars, in which great rival nations sought to control Italian

wealth and the dominion of the Mediterranean. There followed the

so-called religious {26} wars, in which Sweden played for control of

the Baltic, Holland for the East Indian colonies, and England for trade

supremacy, while Catholic France, to strengthen her position at the

expense of Austria, came to the aid of Protestant Germany. For another

century, from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Peace of Paris in

1763, there was a succession of commercial wars, in which England

wrested from Holland and then from France the mastery of the sea as

well as the control of Asia and America. During all this period the

rising commercial classes of England were brutally "upon the make."

Markets were gained in America and valuable commercial rights obtained

from Portugal, while in the famous contract, known as the "_Assiento_,"

English merchants secured from Spain the lucrative privilege of

shipping one hundred and forty-four thousand negro slaves to the

Spanish colonies of America. Of such was the texture of the complex

European diplomacy that held the world in war.

In all these conflicts there was precious little idealism. The astute

councillors of Elizabeth, of James, of Louis XIV, did not waste their

august sovereign's time upon discourses concerning Britain's honour and

the grandeur of France, but talked trade, privileges, monopolies,

colonies to be exploited, money to be made. So too the Napoleonic

Wars, those great conflicts between democracy and absolutism, reveal

themselves as a continuation of the commercial wars of the eighteenth

century. It was all the same process, the ranging of the nations, as

formerly of tribes and of cities, for the conquest, first, of the means

to live, and, second, of a preferred economic position in the world.

Such is the business of war, and it is the oldest business in the

world. It is aided by patriotism, prejudice, uncharitableness and a

whole calendar of ugly tribal virtues, {27} which enjoin us to love the

means by which we get and hate the men from whom we take. It is aided

by racial scorn, a thing as deep as life, yet subject on the whole to

that more impelling factor, economic motive. The history of war and

peace is a history of the overriding of sentimental considerations by

imperious economic needs. During the Revolutionary War, no love was

lost between the rigid, race-conscious Englishman and the despised

red-skin, yet both joined hands to scalp Americans in the lonely

settlements along our frontier. To-day German and Turk, Italian and

Russian, Frenchman and Senegambian, Briton and Japanese, love each

other at least temporarily because pursuing like interests. Not that

the influence of race and nationality upon those mutual repulsions

which lead to war can be brushed aside in a paragraph. They are

potent, modifying factors, with a certain independence of action, and

serving, with regard to economic motives, as accelerators, intensifiers

or, to change the illustrations, as containers. Yet it is no great

exaggeration to say that no racial antagonism can wholly sunder allies

joined by a vital economic bond, and no racial sympathy firmly unite

nations who want one indivisible thing. The "Anglo-Saxon cousins" now

live in concord, but not solely because they are Anglo-Saxons. As for

religious differences, which have in the past so often exacerbated the

war spirit, this influence is less than appears. Even the godly live

on bread and butter. The Protestant princes of the Reformation hated

the Scarlet Woman because of the Real Presence, but they also hated her

because of the golden stream that flowed from Germany to Rome. The

English Reformation had less to do with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with

the wealth of the monasteries. Especially among modern industrial

nations, with their increasing theological {28} apathy, are religious

differences of relatively small importance in determining wars. It is

the economic motive which tells.[2]

Considering all these facts of history, so hastily reviewed,

considering that in practically all countries and at all times economic

impulses have tended to push men into war, is the conclusion forced

upon us that we shall have war so long as we have economic desires, and

that in the future mankind will continue to drag itself along a

blood-stained path? Can we change in human nature that desire for

material things, which has always been the great survival virtue of the

race?

To many men the answer points to perpetual war. They believe that

nations will fight so long as they are hungry, and they will always be

hungry. War and birth are the twin immortals; there will always be

more babies than can be fed and there will always be war. As well

preach against death as against war, since the peaceful, abstaining

nations are doomed to extinction and the war-like nations survive and

determine the character of humanity. The meek nations do not inherit

the earth. They go down in the ceaseless struggle between the living

and the dying peoples.

During the last one hundred and fifty years, however, a more optimistic

conviction has struggled for expression. The Industrial Revolution has

enormously increased the wealth of the world, and has enabled

over-populated industrial countries to secure their food from

agricultural {29} lands thousands of miles away. There has grown up a

vast complementary trade between old and new countries, and even

competing manufacturing nations find it profitable to trade with one

other. The hope has therefore arisen that perhaps this war-breeding,

economic motive may hereafter lead to peace and away from war.

Admitted that peoples once had to fight, may it not in this New World

of industry be "good business" to live and let live, to agree with your

competitor, to trade amicably? May not the industrial transformations,

undreamed of in past centuries, permit a world-population to live off

its labour, immune from the necessity of killing? Have we not here an

alternative to war?

The doctrine is that of _laissez-faire_, untrammelled competition, free

trade. From Adam Smith down to the present day, it has been preached

to us that each man's enlightened selfishness, unguided and unimpeded,

will work out to the welfare of each society and to peace between all

societies. The interests of nations in trade is held to be reciprocal.

Buyer and seller both gain, so that England cannot prosper unless

Germany prospers, and England cannot suffer without Germany suffering.

You need not fight for commerce. Trade does not follow the flag but

the line of greatest mutual advantage, as was shown, it is claimed,

when Britain after losing political control of America doubled her

commerce with America. It does not pay to fight for colonies, since

colonials if left alone will buy in the cheapest and sell in the

dearest market. With nothing to fight for, peace and prosperity will

come with free trade, which the nations will adopt as soon as they

perceive their own interests. There is no economic reason for warfare,

which like other superstitions will vanish as men emerge from the

darkness of ignorance.

It is a pacifying theory, and yet something seems wrong {30} with it.

The optimistic forecasts have been belied; the nations have not

acclaimed free trade, but rear tariff walls higher than ever. Nor do

the nations abjure colonial expansion, but fight for colonies and

"spheres of influence" and lands for "peaceful penetration," as tribes

once fought for pastures, and cities for trade-routes. The national

spirit, instead of succumbing to an era of peaceful individualism and

cosmopolitanism, is stronger and more embittered than ever. Armaments

pile up. Colonial disputes become more acrid, international jealousies

more acute, until in the end we are cast into the pit of the

long-dreaded World War. We do not know that this is the last World

War. We are not sure that the same inveterate, millennium-old struggle

for food, the same bitter "business" which has always meant war, is yet

finished and done for.

Even if war does not cease, however, may we not at least be exempt from

the scourge on this safe side of the broad Atlantic? Though it rains

outside, may we not keep dry beneath our big umbrella? We Americans

are accustomed to think of ourselves as a peace-loving, unaggressive

people, envying no nation its dominion or wealth, and incurring the

enmity of no nation. Let the peoples of Europe destroy themselves in

ceaseless, insane conflicts, but let us, by keeping to our side of the

ocean, save ourselves from slaughter as Lot was saved from the fate of

Gomorrah.

It is not a noble caution that thus disregards the fate of the world

and seeks only the national safety. Nor is it in truth a wise caution.

Those who are too circumspect incur the greatest danger, and those who

trust to their own unoffending reckon on a doubtful factor. Why should

we alone, among the nations be exempt from economic forces, which drive

peace-loving nations into war? Have we by our rapid expansion, to say

nothing of our Monroe declaration and other pretensions, failed to give

offence in a world, {31} in which mere having is aggression and mere

growing a menace? Has our peace in the past been due to our own

meekness and unaggressiveness, or has it been the gift of a fortunate

economic condition, which may pass? Before we rely upon the

continuance of a peace of mere isolation, we shall do well to inquire

into the economic conditions which so long gave us peace.

[1] Ernest Barker. Crusades. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh

Edition, Vol. VII, p. 526.

[2] For a sketch of the economic influences bearing upon war, see the

brilliant essay of Prof. Edward Van Dyke Robinson, "War and Economics

in History and Theory," _Political Science Quarterly_, Vol. XV, pp.

581-622. Reproduced in "Sociology and Social Progress," compiled by

Prof. Thomas Nixon Carver (1905), pp. 133-173. In the present chapter

I have borrowed extensively from Professor Robinson's essay.

{32}

CHAPTER III

PEACE WITHOUT EFFORT

To the average American of a few years ago the maintenance of peace

seemed as natural and easy as breathing. Except for our brief and

episodical conflict with Spain we had had no war with a European Power

for a hundred years and we saw no reason why we should go to war in any

of the coming centuries. Peace was merely an abstention from war, a

not doing something, which we had no desire to do. We had no reason to

provoke war, no foreign nation had a legitimate grievance against us.

In any case we were inherently different from Europe. We were peaceful

while Europe was war-like. So long as we tended to our own

affairs---and that was our intention--peace was assured.

Believing thus in our intrinsic peacefulness, it was in no spirit of

humility that we met the outbreak of the Great War. We did not put

ourselves in the place of the fighting nations, and acknowledge that in

their circumstances we too might have been struggling in the dust.

Rather we boasted of our restraining democracy, and of our perfect

co-operative union, which protected us from the European anarchy. We,

a people unassailed, talked loudly of our superior merit, and, as we

looked over the broad oceans and saw no enemy, thanked God that He had

not made us as other nations. Our compassion for the peoples of Europe

was tinged with a bland, self-righteous arrogance.

It is not pleasant to-day to read the homilies which {33} America,

during those early months of the war, preached to unheeding Europe.

Throughout runs a note of subdued self-exaltation. We, the Americans,

so ran the boast, are not ruled by Kaiser or Czar, and cannot be

stampeded into war against our will. We do not extend our national

territory by force. Of all nations we are the one that has best

compounded economic differences and best dissolved racial hatreds. We

live in amity with all the world, and with piety preach our lessons to

the war-mad races. How fundamentally insolent, though

well-intentioned, was this message of one of our leading citizens to

Germany. "The American people cry with one voice to the German people,

like Ezekiel to the house of Israel: 'Turn ye, turn ye, from your evil

ways; for why will ye die?'"

Even in our churches we made the same unconscious boast. On Sunday,

October 4, 1914, at the request of the President of the United States,

millions of Americans went down on their knees, and prayed God no

longer to scourge the peoples of Europe. It was a sincere prayer,

evoked by real compassion. Yet nothing could more clearly have

revealed our moral detachment, our obliviousness to the fact that the

passions which brought forth this war were human, not European

passions. We, the virtuous, interceded for the vicious; our prayer was

"deliver them from evil." With malice toward none, with charity

towards all, envying no nation its treasures, content to enjoy in peace

what God had given us, America folded its hands in prayer.

To a sceptical European, accustomed to the cant of international

protestations, this boasted peacefulness of ours seems suspicious.

"Have you," he might ask, "always been peaceful? Did you not fight

England, Mexico and Spain? Have you not taken advantage of your

neighbours' necessities?" Such a European might not regard {34}

Americans as a nation, divinely appointed to bring peace to a world

rent by war. He might not acknowledge that we are more law-abiding

than other peoples, freer from race hatreds, gentler towards the

unfortunates of our own race. He might point to our lynchings and

riots; to our unpunished murders of Chinese, Italians and Mexicans; to

the system of repression, by which the Southern whites terrorized the

freedmen after the Civil War. If Europe did not solve the Balkan

problem in peace, did Americans end slavery without resort to arms?

We may not like these imputations, but it would be hard to deny that in

certain national crises we have not been impossibly virtuous. We have

not always subordinated our national interests to the ideal of setting

a righteous example. What we wanted and could get we got, whether it

was Florida, Texas, California or Panama. We were not above the

twisting or even the breaking of a treaty, we did not discourage

filibustering expeditions too rigorously, and we were never, never

meek. Thus in 1818, to take a single example, we addressed to Spain a

polite communication in which we asserted that "the United States can

as little compound with impotence as with perfidy, and that Spain must

immediately make her election, either to place (an adequate) force in

Florida or cede to the United States a province, of which she retains

nothing but the nominal possession." Many of our communications to

Mexico, Chile, Spain, and even England were equally arrogant.

The truth is that our peace has been a peace of circumstances, due to a

favouring geographical and economic situation. Our peacefulness came

down to us like our rivers, farms and cities, a heritage of exceptional

conditions. We were inaccessible to European armies. We were supreme

on a fertile, sparsely settled continent. We could afford peace. Our

resources were immensely great and if {35} we did not reach out for

more, it was because we already had as much as we could handle. What

we did need we could take from weak peoples, and a nation which fights

weak peoples need not be martial, just as a man who robs orphans need

not be a thug.

It might have been different. Had our Westward progress been opposed

by millions of Indians, had France been able to resist our march beyond

the Appalachians, or Mexico stood like a disciplined Germany between us

and the Westward Ocean, we should have developed a military

civilisation. As our growing population pressed upon our narrow

frontiers, we should have had our war scares, our border conflicts, our

national hatreds, our huge standing army, and the whole paraphernalia

of militarism.

Still another element, besides our geographical isolation and our

economic self-sufficiency, contributed to our intactness and security

and permitted us to indulge in the luxury of pacifism. Europe

protected us from Europe. We were one and the European Powers many.

So delicate was the balance that the European nations could not hazard

a really serious trans-Atlantic venture. They had little to gain and

much to lose by fighting us, as we had nothing to gain by fighting

them. Our interest in such European affairs as the independence of

Greece, Hungary and Poland was purely sentimental. Towards Europe we

were peaceful as we were peaceful towards Mars. True, our safe orators

delighted in twisting the lion's tail and upbraiding the Czar of all

the Russias. During the eighty-three years between 1815 and 1898,

however, we were never at war with a European nation.

It was not that we loved Europe too well. England we detested and

hardly a decade passed without some acrid boundary dispute. We thought

her arrogant, greedy, supercilious, and she thought us arrogant, greedy

and {36} coarse. Millions of Irish immigrants intensified this

animosity and our national vanity did the rest. But though we hated

England she was too formidable to be attacked. Therefore we bluffed

and she bluffed, and in the end we compromised.

With other countries it was still easier to keep at peace. Prussia,

Austria and the smaller German states were too distant to affect our

interests. For Russia we had a vague attachment, and except on one

occasion, she never threatened our ambitions. With France we were on

good terms except during our Civil War. We disliked Spain and despised

her, but events prevented our going to war with her.

It was because it paid that we kept at peace; any other policy would

have been wasteful, even suicidal. Our future depended upon our

ability to keep out of war. A sparse population on the edge of a vast

continent, our hope of national success lay in an isolation, which

would give us strength for future struggles. Our mission was to settle

the empty lands to the West before other nations could pre-empt them.

To embroil ourselves with strong powers was to court disaster, while

even to interest ourselves in European politics would divert our mind

from our own imperative task.

Our first American foreign policy, therefore was disentanglement. We

often speak as though America passively abstained from entering

European politics. We were, however, already a part of the unsteady

balance of power, and warring France and England sought our aid, much

as the two coalitions might seek the aid of a Bulgaria, not loving her

but needing her help. It was a bold and above all a positive policy

that Washington established when he broke the French treaty and

declared our neutrality. Though denounced as dishonourable, this

policy was {37} essential to our welfare and peace, for the country was

more dangerously divided in 1793 than in 1916.

How intimately our peace has depended upon our economic development is

revealed by the early failure of this policy of disentanglement. Prior

to 1812 our immediate economic interests overhung our territory and

transcended our sovereignty. All Europe being at war, we were the

neutral carriers of the world. Our ships brought merchandise to France

from her colonies and allies, and goods from the West Indies and South

America to all parts of Europe. In the decade ending 1801 our foreign

trade, which was dependent upon the indulgence of Europe, more than

quadrupled. The profits on our carrying trade were immense. Our

shipbuilding industry increased, and not only were orders filled for

our own foreign trade but many ships were manufactured for export. The

prices of agricultural products almost doubled and our meat, flour,

cotton and wool found a ready market in Europe. Our prosperity

depended upon this newly created foreign trade. Sail-makers,

ship-builders, draymen, farmers, merchants were dependent upon a trade

which menaced the commercial supremacy of Great Britain and upon which

even France looked with jealous apprehension.

It was this conflict of our interests with those of a stronger nation

that brought on the bitter controversies with Great Britain, and

resulted in the tedious war of 1812. We were more dependent upon

Europe than Europe upon us, as was shown by the fiasco of our Embargo

policy. England, determined to kill our commerce, would have fought

many years to accomplish this purpose. But it did not prove necessary.

Our commercial progress, that had been merely an incident in a European

war, lessened after the peace. For us this was fortunate. Our future

lay in our own continent, and not on the high sea where as {38} a

relatively weak nation, we should have been forced to compete with the

world and war continually with England.

To-day, one hundred years later we are still pacific, because of the

direction taken by our economic development since 1815. While we

developed agriculture, constructed turnpikes, canals and railroads,

manufactured for the home market, and filled up the country from the

Appalachians to the Pacific, our American-borne commerce and our

shipbuilding declined; by 1846, our American tonnage in foreign trade

was less than in 1810. But the profits of this carrying trade were no

longer necessary, since in exchange for our imports from Europe we

could now export cotton. We were no longer competitors with Europe,

but had become contributors to European prosperity. Prior to 1815

England looked upon us as a commercial rival; after 1815 we became the

unconscious economic allies of all the industrial nations.

The extent to which our economic system had become complementary to the

European economic system is illustrated by a study of the statistics of

our foreign commerce. Of our exports one-half was raw cotton, and upon

a steady supply of this fibre a great European industry depended.

Later we shipped huge quantities of food which was also needed by the

manufacturers across the sea. As our cotton area extended, as our

wheat and meat exports increased, European, and especially British,

industry profited. At the same time, despite our high tariffs we

furnished an increasing market for wares manufactured in Europe, while

our own manufactures did not largely compete in the world markets.

Moreover the rapid development of our internal resources furnished

lucrative investment opportunities to European capital. A source of

raw material, a market for manufactured products, a field for

profitable investment, {39} America was Europe's back-yard, an economic

colony, though politically independent.

In the midst of this almost colonial development, there occurred one

startling interlude. About 1840 we developed a new type of sailing

vessel, the American clipper ship. Soon we had control of the China

trade and by 1861 our shipping (including domestic trade and the

fisheries) about equalled that of Great Britain. After the Civil War,

however, our chance of competing with Great Britain either in

ship-building or carrying disappeared. The iron steamship had arrived,

and, in the manufacture of such vessels, we were no match for the

English. Even without the Civil War we should have been beaten; the

Southern privateers, outfitted in English ports, merely hastened an

inevitable decay. We were not yet to enter upon a competition with

England for commercial supremacy.

There being thus no economic basis for war our outstanding questions

with European nations, and with England especially, were peacefully

settled. The Canadian fisheries and the Maine boundary dispute gave

rise to much bitter feeling but were not worth a war. Even the Monroe

Doctrine did not bring on a clash. Though Great Britain hated its

assumptions she was content with its practical workings. What the

United States gained was immunity from the settlement of Latin America

by powerful military nations; what England gained was a profitable

trade (denied her by Spain) together with opportunities for investing

capital. The immediate force behind the Monroe Doctrine was the

self-interest and naval power of a nation, which did not recognise the

doctrine.

Our westward expansion, which obliterated boundaries and overran the

possessions of other powers, also failed to bring war with Europe.

Doubtless this expansion was not {40} entirely welcome to France,

England and Spain. But just as Napoleon, though dreaming of a French

Empire on our western border, had been compelled to sell us Louisiana

to prevent its falling into British hands, so later England resigned

herself to our almost instinctive growth. It was believed in the

forties that England not only wished to prevent our acquiring

California but desired the territory for herself, and it was known that

her interests in Oregon were in the sharpest conflict with American

claims. England would also have preferred that Texas remain

politically independent of the United States and commercially dependent

upon herself. Fortunately for us, however, an aggressive colonial

policy, such as that which during the last forty years has partitioned

Africa, was not yet popular in Europe. England was thinking in terms

of free trade and commercial expansion, of a world rather than a

colonial market. At bottom, moreover, this American expansion was to

the relative advantage of Europe. When Spain was cajoled and worried

into selling Florida; when Texas, and later California, Arizona and New

Mexico were taken from a nation too weak almost to feel resentment, the

result was a better use of the territory and a greater production of

the things which Europe needed. If Europe was not to control these

regions, it was at least better for her to have them pass to us rather

than remain with Mexico. So long as we held politically aloof, sold

Europe cotton and wheat, bought from her manufactured products and gave

her the chance to invest in our railroads, so long as we did not

compete on the sea or in the world markets, Europe, though she envied

us our easy expansion, had no interest in opposing it by war. England

would possibly have fought us had we taken Nicaragua and almost

certainly had we taken Canada, but she was less concerned about the

fate of Mexico, the chief victim of our expansion.

{41}

This complementary relation of ours with European nations was as useful

to us as to them. Besides furnishing us with necessary capital Europe

sent us immigrants, who made our march across the Continent rapid and

irresistible. In the end this immigrant population contributed to our

peaceful attitude. As the number of our alien stocks increased, the

desirability of going to war with any European nation diminished. To

get the immigrant's vote, we spoke highly, and in the end almost

thought highly, of the nations from which they had come. By admitting

the children of Europe we had given hostages to peace.

In the main, however, we paid no attention to Europe. We forgot about

her. Lost in contemplation of our own limitless future, we turned our

eyes westward towards our ever receding frontier. In foreign, as in

home relations, we developed a frontier mind, and even to-day, long

after our last frontier has been reached, we are still thinking of

Europe, as of so many of our internal problems, in terms of this great

colonising adventure. The individualist, who pushed his way across the

continent, left on America the impress of a simple philosophy, a belief

that there was a chance for all, that it was better to work than to

fight, that arbitration and the splitting of the difference were the

best policy. To the average American, with his frontier mind, wars

seemed unnecessary, and all the class distinctions, inseparable from

militarism, a mere frippery. Wars, he held, are for the crowded old

peoples of Europe, with their dynastic superstitions, their cheating

diplomacy, their ancient rancours, their millions of paupered subjects,

condemned to a life of subordination. Wars are not for the free and

equal Americans who live in the wide spaces of a continent and, having

no neighbours, hate no man and fear no man.

It is out of this frontier mind that we have evolved our {42} present

American notion of war and foreign policy. Peace is common sense; war,

foolishness, a superstition like the belief in Kings, Emperors and

Potentates, a calamity caused by the refusal of the petty European

nations to join into one great United States. For it must be

remembered that Americans, whatever their sentimental attachments, are

really more contemptuous than are Germans of little nations that insist

upon surviving. We ridicule the European customs barriers, which the

express train strikes every few hours, and associate national greatness

with territorial size. Even Great Britain, France, Germany and Austria

are ignorantly regarded as "little nations," which would be all the

better for a wholesome amalgamation. The frontier mind believes

stubbornly that short of such a union, these "little" peoples should

develop their own resources in peace. In other words, our attitude

towards Europe, which is a result of our elbow room and our economic

self-sufficiency, is vaguely missionary, with not the slightest tinge

of hypocrisy. We have no concern with Europe and no duty to interfere,

beyond expressing our belief in our own superior institutions and the

hope that Europe will learn by our example.

The development of our manufacturing industries, until recently at

least, did not alter these views concerning our proper attitude to

Europe. The new industries, chiefly designed for a home market, made

on the whole for peace. Nor did we need a foreign outlet for capital.

No one wished to go to war for the dubious privilege of investing in

Peru or China when our own iron mills, cotton factories and railroads

were clamouring for capital, to say nothing of our farmers in Oklahoma

and the Dakotas.

Psychologically, also, this self-poised industrialism, this domestic

stay-at-home business of ours, which prevailed until a few decades ago,

worked powerfully for peace. {43} We became a highly individualistic

manufacturing nation, composed of millions of self-seeking,

money-making men. As "business men" we hated wars as we hated strikes

and whatever else "interfered with business." Our ideal was a

strenuous life of acquisition, in which dollars were added to dollars,

and the prosperity of all depended upon the bank account of each. Wars

were like earthquakes and other interruptions of the ordained process

of accumulation; you could no more win a war than you could win an

earthquake. America's manifest destiny was to multiply and increase.

We were to mind our own business and live in peace with neighbours,

whom we did not know and rather despised. Since everything worth

exploiting was in our own country, since Europe left us alone and had

nothing that we were willing to fight for, we were free to ignore all

foreign relations.

The diplomacy which accompanied and aided this development, though not

heroic, was at least successful. It enabled us to grow strong and hold

strong enemies away. Not always consistent, not always able, not

always honest, our diplomacy maintained a certain unity, kept us aloof

from European quarrels, guarded us from threatened intervention during

the Civil War crisis, warned Europe against the conquest of Latin

America, and above all--permitted us to grow. From 1815 to 1898 our

population increased from eight to seventy-two millions, while that of

the United Kingdom increased only from some twenty to forty-one

millions and that of France from twenty-nine to thirty-nine millions.

Our wealth increased at a more rapid rate than that of any other nation.

Small wonder that in the last decades of this period our diplomacy sank

to the lowest level of incapacity. Having grown strong without

Europe's aid or hindrance, having reached that pleasant degree of

independence in which {44} diplomacy seemed a mere international

formality, we came to believe that the best diplomacy was none at all.

We did not require in our ambassadors knowledge or astuteness; any fool

would do. Our diplomats were often despised, but since we were not

dependent upon Europe's favour, it did not matter. Economic forces,

stronger than the diplomats of all the world, were making for peace

between America and Europe.

But even while we were sending political adventurers to some of the

great capitals of Europe, a change was impending. All at once the

United States found itself at war with a European power, and, a few

months later, in surprised, not to say embarrassed, possession of

tropical Asiatic Islands. Suddenly we discovered that we were feared

and disliked; that there were points of controversy between us and

various European countries; that Europe somehow did not regard the

Monroe Doctrine as a divine dispensation, which it would be impious to

oppose. We heard talk of international competition, World Power, "the

American Menace." Beneath the surface there appeared indications that

our long mutuality of economic interest with Europe was no longer

complete. The easy instinctive peace which had enabled us to attain

our ends without considering Europe seemed about to end.

{45}

CHAPTER IV

AN UNRIPE IMPERIALISM

It was in the year 1898 that the United States made its earliest plunge

into imperialism. Then for the first time we secured "dominions beyond

the sea"; dominions too thickly populated to be adapted for purposes of

colonisation. By our earlier conquests and purchases (Louisiana,

Florida, Texas, California, New Mexico), we had secured relatively

empty territories which a flow of emigrants from our Eastern States

could rapidly Americanise. But in Porto Rico, the Philippines and

Hawaii, there was neither prospect nor intention of colonising. The

impulse that led to their taking was the desire to possess their

wealth, to rule and "civilise" them, and above all not "to haul down

the flag." It was an impulse not very different from that which led to

the European partition of Africa.[1]

The change in our policy was startling. We had seemed, after the Civil

War, to have reached a stage of satiety, to be through with expansion.

Henceforth the ocean was to be our boundary; we were not, like the

slave-owners before the war, to scheme for new lands in Central {46}

America and the Caribbean. When in 1867 Russia offered us a territory

almost three times as large as Germany for a sum about equal to the

value of the Equitable Building, we accepted only to oblige Russia and

because we believed that we were in honour bound to buy. We refused to

purchase St. Thomas and St. Johns, although Denmark offered to sell

cheap, and we declined to annex San Domingo or to entertain Sweden's

proposal to purchase her West Indian possessions. Again in 1893,

instead of annexing Hawaii, we vainly sought to bolster up the

sovereignty of a native Queen. Then suddenly Porto Rico, the

Philippines and Guam were annexed; Hawaii was incorporated and Samoa

was divided up with Germany.

In part this change in foreign policy was due to military

considerations. The possession of Hawaii, Panama and Guantanamo in

Cuba was obviously necessary for the defence of our coasts. Just as

the Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect us from the approach of

great military powers, so these new acquisitions were desired to

pre-empt near-lying bases, from which, in enemy possession fleets might

assail our trade or cut off our communications.[2]

Such strategic considerations, however, do not explain the whole of our

new imperialistic policy. Economic motives played their part. We

changed our foreign policy because at the same time we were undergoing

a commercial and industrial revolution.

As a result of this industrial change our merchants had begun to think

in terms of foreign markets and our financiers in terms of foreign

investments. We had passed {47} through the stage in which our

industrial life was completely self-sufficing. We were becoming a

manufacturing nation, requiring markets for the disposal of surplus

products. We were, it appeared, being drawn into a great international

competition, in which markets in China, South America and backward

countries were the prizes. Simultaneously our foreign commerce had

changed. Our growing population had made increasing demands upon our

food products, leaving less to be exported, and at the same time our

exports of manufactures had increased. In 1880 we exported

manufactures (ready for consumption) to the value of ninety-three

millions of dollars; in 1898 to the value of two hundred and

twenty-three millions.

Other industrial factors tended also to bring about a change in our

national ideals. We were beginning to believe in the economic

efficiency of trust organisation, and our industry, conducted on a

larger scale, was being increasingly concentrated. A new class was in

financial control of our great industries. The trust magnate, the new

conductor of vast industrial enterprises, was looking forward toward a

strong unified banking control over industries and a definite expansion

of American trade in foreign countries. American capitalists were

beginning to believe that their economic needs were the same as those

of the European capitalists, who were enticing their nations into

imperialism.

Psychologically, also, we were ripe for any imperialistic venture, for

we enormously exaggerated the progress we had made towards

industrialisation, and were thinking in terms of Europe. We suddenly

believed that we too were over-filled with capital and compelled to

find an outlet for investments and trade. Innumerable editorials

appeared, presenting the arguments for imperialism that had been {48}

urged ad nauseam in Europe. We could not resist, it was argued, the

ubiquitous economic tendency toward expansion. In all countries,

including America, capital was to become congested. An over-saving of

capital, invested in manufacturing plants, produced far in excess of

the possible consumption of the people. We had reached a stage of

chronic over-production, in which increased saving and increased

investment of capital would permanently outstrip consumption.

Everywhere wealth was being heaped up; the savings-banks overflowed;

the rate of interest fell and capital sought desperately for new

investments. The capitalist system must either expand or burst.

Certain superficial developments in the United States formed the

groundwork of these gloomy prophecies. We had just passed through a

commercial depression, during which prices and interest rates fell and

great numbers of workers were left unemployed. These facts were

exploited by political leaders and industrial magnates, who thought in

terms of the subordination of American foreign policy to the needs of

big business. It is not surprising therefore that they became infected

with the new imperialism, which in Europe had been growing steadily for

over fifteen years, and that they came to the conclusion that America

could not hold hands off while the markets and investment fields of the

world were divided up among her rivals.

"The United States," wrote Charles A. Conant, one of the intellectual

leaders of this movement (in 1898), "cannot afford to adhere to a

policy of isolation while other nations are reaching out for the

command of new markets. The United States are still large users of

foreign capital, but American investors are not willing to see the

return upon their investments reduced to the European level. Interest

rates have greatly declined here within the last {49} five years. New

markets and new opportunities for investment must be found if surplus

capital is to be profitably employed."

Like so many of the pamphleteers of 1898, Mr. Conant was convinced that

imperialism offered the only cure "for the enormous congestion of

capital." No civilised state, he contended, would accept the doctrine

that saving should be abandoned. And while human desires were

expansible, he doubted whether the demand for goods could possibly

increase with sufficient rapidity to absorb the new productive

capacities of the nation. "There has never been a time," he writes,

"when the proportion of capital to be absorbed has been so great in

proportion to possible new demands. Means for building more bicycle

factories than are needed, and for laying more electric railways than

are able to pay dividends, have been taken out of current savings

within the last few years, without producing any marked effect upon

their amount and without doing more, at the most, than to stay the

downward course of the rate of interest."

It therefore follows conclusively that the American conquest of markets

and fields for investment must go on. The method of such a conquest is

of little importance. "In pointing out," he says, "the necessity that

the United States shall enter upon a broad national policy, it need not

be determined in just what manner that policy shall be worked out.

Whether the United States shall actually acquire territorial

possessions, shall set up captain generalships and garrisons, whether

they shall adopt the middle ground of protecting sovereignties

nominally independent, or whether they shall content themselves with

naval stations and diplomatic representations as the basis for

asserting their rights to the free commerce of the East, is a matter of

detail."

{50}

I have quoted Mr. Conant at length because he is so largely typical of

the state of mind of the American plutocracy in the year 1898. It

would have been easily possible, however, to have presented any amount

of confirmatory material of exactly the same nature. An article by W.

Dodsworth in the October, 1898 number of the _Nineteenth Century_ is

along the same lines. Here again we read of an unprecedented

industrial revolution during the preceding half century and a vast

increase in foreign trade and accumulated wealth. Again we read of the

falling rate of interest and of the failure of trusts and combines to

resist the outside pressure of necessitous capital, seeking to force

its way into industries. It was held quite impossible for consumption

to absorb the products of an over-fertile industry. "I am no

pessimist," writes Mr. Dodsworth, "but I cannot conceal my deep

conviction that, if this relief is not forthcoming, a stage of grave

industrial collapse, attended with the agitation of equally grave

political issues, becomes only too probable, and the energies of our

seventy-five millions of producers may have to be restrained until we

learn to appreciate the penalty of our neglect of foreign enterprise."

Such were the arguments with which in 1898 the United States plunged

into imperialism. We were to break out of the narrow circle which

confined our economic life to become the work-shop of the world as

England had once been, to export and export and ever increasingly

export until all the nations should be our debtors. Our capital, like

our wares, was to go to all countries. It flattered our pride when, a

few years later, Europe trembled at the spectre of an American

commercial invasion and even England wondered whether she could

withstand the flood of cheap manufactured American goods, dumped on her

{51} shores. We pictured a vastly increasing trade with our new

colonial possessions and with China; we envisaged opportunities, not

only of an immense American investment, but of an even greater American

trade.

What we believed of ourselves, Europe only too credulously believed of

us. Leading European economists and publicists were completely

convinced that the United States was irrevocably embarked on "the sea

of imperialism." "The recent entrance of the powerful and progressive

nation of the United States of America upon imperialism," wrote Prof.

John A. Hobson in 1902, "... not only adds a new formidable competitor

for trade and territory, but changes and complicates the issue. As the

focus of political attention and activity shifts more to the Pacific

States, and the commercial aspirations of America are more and more set

upon trade with the Pacific Islands and the Asiatic coast, the same

forces which are driving European States along the path of territorial

expansion seem likely to act upon the United States."[3] Professor

Hobson and other foreign observers believed that our great trusts,

which were being formed with reckless suddenness, would enormously

increase the capital seeking an outlet, and that new imperialistic

ventures would result. "Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii," he insisted,

"are but the _hors d'oeuvre_ to whet an appetite for an ampler

banquet."[4]

This development toward a congestion of capital, though confidently

anticipated both in the United States and in Europe, did not take

place. About the end of the century an enormous extension of the

general field for foreign investment raised interest rates all over the

world. The demand for capital grew with astonishing rapidity. In {52}

part this was due to British, French and German foreign investments,

but it was also the result of a quickened economic tempo in all

countries. New industries were created, wages rose (though in most

countries not so rapidly as prices) and the outlets for the supposed

superfluous capital were greater than ever.

Especially in the United States was the development contrary to that

which had been anticipated. Capital was not rendered idle because of

any slackening in the nation's consuming capacity, for the men of

average and small income were able to purchase more than ever before.

The farmers alone, whose property increased in value from twenty and a

half billions of dollars in 1900 to forty-one billions in 1910 (an

increase of over 100 per cent. as compared with less than 28 per cent.

in the previous decade) added stupendously to a new demand for goods of

all sorts. Of automobiles, unknown in 1898, there are in 1916 almost

three millions. Innumerable other industries arose and expanded; the

anticipated arrest of accumulation did not occur.

The result of this economic development soon made itself apparent. We

discovered, fortunately for us, that we were not at this time to become

the work-shop of the world. We could not continue to produce articles

cheaper than England or Germany, and undersell these countries in their

home markets. We discovered that our own country still furnished an

admirable field for investment. While our foreign commerce increased,

it continued to form only a small part of our whole trade. So long as

vast new opportunities for the investment of capital in the United

States presented themselves, we ceased to worry about foreign or

colonial outlets, and for every dollar of American money invested in

Porto Rico and the Philippines, hundreds of dollars were invested in

the states. Our capital {53} though accumulating at an ever-increasing

rate, did not equal the demand.[5]

In other words, the conditions in America did not yet warrant an

imperialistic policy. We were economically younger than we had

thought; more elastic, with greater capacity for internal growth. As a

result of this discovery, our sudden enthusiasm for dominions beyond

the seas died down. We were disgusted and bored by the Philippine war;

we hated the role of oppressors, in which we unwillingly found

ourselves. We hated the water cure, punitive expeditions, and the

endless controversies over the status of Filipinos under American law.

The anti-imperialistic elements in America, men whose interests did not

lie in foreign trade and speculation, stolidly opposed the retention of

the islands. Had the election of 1900 been fought upon this single

issue it would probably have been won by the anti-imperialists. Even

though we kept the islands, we set definite limitations to our

imperialistic ventures. We secured for the Philippines an

administration which prevented the exploitation of the natives and the

importation of Chinese labour. We set our faces against any policy of

sacrificing the interests of the indigenous population to the interests

of American financiers. And to-day, could we do it with due regard to

the interests of the Filipinos, we would retire from the archipelago.

As we look over this experiment, we cannot help recognising that it was

a precocious, an unripe imperialism. For us it was too early to secure

Asiatic islands; too early {54} to worry about American investments in

foreign lands. It was an imperialism carried out somnambulistically.

Our taking the Philippines was an accident, unforeseen and

undesired.[6] Our hope of being the work-shop and banking centre of

the world, of being the heart of a great empire like that of Britain,

and of doing all this within a short period, was a dream, which

vanished with the new demands made upon American capital by an

increasing economic expansion.

The truth is that this unripe imperialism did not represent the

interests of the majority nor even of any considerable group of our

capital owners. It was doomed to disappearance once the revival of

American industry offered opportunities, not only for the ordinary

capitalist, but for that more speculative investor, who in other

countries clamours for imperialism. The experiment revealed, however,

that the same forces which act upon capital in Europe act also upon

capital in America, and that the United States, given the right

conditions, is liable to the same ambitions as are imperialistic

countries and is as likely to engage in war to satisfy these ambitions.

The imperialistic trend acts upon all nations at a given stage in their

economic development. It cannot be stopped by traditions of

peacefulness or by mere protestations, however sincere. It is a part

of the great economic strife, out of which devastating wars arise.

[1] "Early in the year 1901, a foreign ambassador at Washington

remarked in the course of a conversation that, although he had been in

America only a short time, he had seen two different countries, the

United States before the war with Spain, and the United States since

the war with Spain. This was a picturesque way of expressing the

truth, now generally accepted, that the war of 1898 was a turning point

in the history of the American republic."--"The United States as a

World Power," by Archibald Gary Coolidge. New York, 1912.

[2] For a study of these strategic considerations see "The Interest of

America in Sea Power, Present and Future," by Captain (later

Rear-Admiral) A. T. Mahan, a series of articles written between 1890

and 1897. Boston, 1911.

[3] John A. Hobson, "Imperialism," p. 23. London, 1902.

[4] _Op. cit._, p. 83.

[5] In 1914, twenty-six years after the cession of the islands our

combined import to and export from the Philippines amounted to only

$51,246,128, or less than 1/75 of our entire foreign commerce. Our

commerce with China, which was to have been opened by our possession of

the Philippines was less than one-half of that with Brazil and less

than one-twelfth of that with Great Britain.

[6] "At the beginning of the war (with Spain) there was perhaps not a

soul in the whole Republic who so much as thought of the possibility of

this nation becoming a sovereign power in the Orient."--"World

Politics," by Prof. Paul I. Reinsch, New York, 1913, p. 64.

{55}

CHAPTER V

FACING OUTWARD

While the imperialistic venture of 1898 was premature and did not lead,

as had been expected, to a conscious participation of America in the

international scramble for colonies, it affected our national thinking

and forced us to re-consider the position of America in relation to the

ambitions and plans of other great nations. Our acquisition of new

dependencies led us to recognise that we were at last a world power,

with the responsibilities of a world power. We were obliged to learn

from England and other imperialistic nations the lessons of colonial

administration. Year by year we were drawn into closer relations with

the West Indies and the Caribbean countries, and were compelled to

assume financial control of Hayti and San Domingo in the interest both

of foreign capital and of the countries themselves. The completion of

the Panama Canal increased our sense of international danger and

international responsibility. Finally the revolution in Mexico proved

to us that whatever our positive action we could not remain passive.

Our Monroe Doctrine also, which had always seemed our charter of

independence of Europe, forces us in the end to come to an

understanding with Europe. We had set our faces against European

conquest in the Americas, and therefore against any punitive

expedition, likely to lead to permanent occupation. But if we

protected Hayti and San Domingo from Europe, we assumed a certain {56}

responsibility for the actions of these countries. In the existing

state of international law, a nation assumes the right to protect its

citizens from spoliation and to compel debtor countries to meet their

obligations. In this right to collect debts by force of arms, which

has been the excuse for innumerable imperialistic extensions, all the

great creditor nations are interested. Had the United States refused

to intervene in San Domingo, while forbidding the great powers to

secure redress by threats, we might possibly have been forced to fight

against overwhelming odds in defence of a people and cause, for which

we had little sympathy. By its very prohibitions the Monroe Doctrine

compels us increasingly to intervene between the weaker Latin-American

countries and the warlike creditor nations of Europe.

The gradual extension of the Doctrine, moreover, vastly increases our

possible area of friction with Europe. Originally planned to prevent

European nations from conquering parts of the Americas, the Doctrine

has now been extended to forbid foreign corporations subsidised or

controlled by an Old World government to acquire any land in the

Americas which might menace the safety or communications of the United

States. Our action in Mexico indicates that we are determined not only

to prevent Europe from introducing monarchical institutions into

American countries, but to insist that those countries themselves

adhere to the outward forms of popular government. Secretary Olney was

speaking no doubt largely for home consumption when he declared that

"the United States is practical sovereign on this continent

(hemisphere), and its fiat is law upon the subject to which it confines

its interpretation." Nevertheless the extension of control either by

the United States or some group of powers is almost inevitable, and

with the widening of the Monroe {57} Doctrine, as a result of closer

relations between Latin America and the Old World, the necessity for

some arrangement between the United States and the great European

powers becomes increasingly obvious.

Our possession of Hawaii and the Philippines acts in the same manner.

In a military sense the Philippines are indefensible; we cannot secure

them against a near-lying military power. Nor can we in the present

stage of national feeling permit them to be conquered. Consequently we

watch the actions of Japan with quite different feelings than if we had

not given her provocation and a bait. The building of the Panama Canal

equally increases our international liabilities. It contributes a vast

new importance to the Caribbean Sea and adds a new weak point to

American territory. Having built and fortified the canal, we are

compelled to think of ways and means of defending it, of armies,

navies, _ententes_ and alliances.

While all these factors, however, have contributed to our changed point

of view, it was the World War which most completely revealed to

Americans the necessity of accommodating our national development to

that of other countries. The war proved that we were in a military

sense vulnerable; that undisciplined citizen soldiery was no match for

trained armies; that mere distance is no complete safety, and that the

initial advantage, which accrues to the prepared nation is out of all

proportion more valuable than later victories. The war showed that

unarmed neutrality and a mere lack of hostile intention does not always

save a nation from invasion. Moreover, we discovered that our

interests were affected favourably or adversely by a conflict, in which

we had no direct part. We, who had always conceived ourselves as a

supremely disinterested nation, a remote island in the blue sea, began

{58} to ask whether it was to our advantage to have France defeated,

Belgium destroyed, Germany crushed, the British Empire disintegrated.

We began to ask how our national interest was affected by the

international competition for colonies, by the freedom or unfreedom of

the seas, by the extension of the right of blockade, by the abrogation

of established laws of warfare; and what the effect upon us would be of

an economic alliance against Germany by the Allied Western Powers. In

other words, we discovered a real national interest in international

arrangements created by the war or to be established after the war.

Our first preoccupation was naturally one of defence. We looked

outward, but only saw armed nations ready to seize upon our wealth and

territory. Responsible authors predicted that the victor in this war

would at his leisure move across the ocean and despoil the United

States. From ponderous puerilities of this sort to the lurid

descriptions of massacre and pillage, vouchsafed us by magazine and

moving picture writers, was a short step. More serious arguments

prevailed, and in the end a large addition was made to our military and

naval forces. But the whole campaign was based solely upon the theory

of defence, and the theory so formulated, was merely a continuation of

the policy of isolation. It involved the idea that we were to act

alone and protect ourselves alone against all nations. It did not

concern itself with our national aims. It was not based upon a

definition of our relations to Europe and to the several nations of

Europe.

As our preparations increase, however, and as we realise how

insufficient our force must be against a European coalition, we shall

be faced with the alternative of entering into agreements or alliances

(to make our defence real) or into some other policy, which might make

defence unnecessary. In either case we must face outward, must {59}

look at the world as it is and is to be, and define our relation to

Europe. We must substitute a positive for a negative policy.

This we are forced to do even though we may have no immediate friction

points with Europe. The economic interpenetration of all nations

involves us in conflicts of interest and adjustments, which require a

positive national policy.

It is our economic development that most strongly pushes us in this

direction. We are gradually destroying the complementary industrial

system which formerly held us to Europe; we are competing with European

countries for world markets and have even begun to compete for

investment opportunities in backward countries. We are exporting

manufactures, and this exportation is likely to increase. Of the six

chief requisites of a great manufacturing nation--coal, iron, copper,

wood, cotton and wool--we are the greatest single producer of all

except the last, and to this advantage of cheap raw materials, there is

added an efficient manufacturing organisation and a large manufacturing

capital. From 1880 to 1910 that capital increased six and a half fold

(from 2.8 to 18.4 billions of dollars). It is therefore no wonder that

we are exporting tools, sewing-machines, locomotives, typewriters,

automobiles and electrical apparatus. These products compete

increasingly with similar products from England and Germany and invade

the markets which Europe desires for herself. Our total exports to

Latin America, for example, have almost quadrupled in twenty-two years,

increasing from 77 millions of dollars in 1890 to 296 millions in 1912.

The significance of this competition, as it exists to-day and will

exist to-morrow, is greater for Europe than for us. Our fundamental

welfare does not absolutely depend {60} upon this exportation; we could

lose a part of this trade, as we lost our shipping, without fatal

results, for we should still have our cotton and many half-finished

products to exchange for our imports. Were Great Britain, however, to

lose her markets for manufactured goods, she would shrink into

insignificance, if she did not literally starve. In 1913 the United

Kingdom spent $1,400,000,000 on imported foods, drink and tobacco, and

for this, as for her importation of raw materials, she must pay. While

our export of manufactures still forms but a trifling part (perhaps one

thirtieth) of our total product, the British and the German export

constitutes an immensely larger proportion. Our export of finished

wares, despite its rapid increase, was in 1914 only some seven dollars

per capita, while that of the United Kingdom was about forty-five

dollars per capita.[1] It will therefore not be wondered at if our

increasing export of manufactures both to Europe and to the countries

to which Europe exports, causes us to be involved, as we have not been

for over a century, in the ambitions, conflicts and life-interests of

the great European nations.

For at bottom a commercial war is an industrial war, a struggle for

national prosperity. If, for example, Germany fails to hold her

foreign markets, she must shut down factories. Her industrial problem

is to buy raw materials from abroad cheap, ship to Germany, manufacture

into finished products, transport to a country {61} willing to buy, and

from this enterprise secure profits enough to purchase food for her

people. If she is beaten out, let us say, in the export cotton

industry she must turn to something else. She may try to save the

industry by increasing efficiency or reducing wages, but if she fails,

she must close up some of her mills. If she cannot employ the growing

masses who depend upon export industries, she must let her surplus

people--and with them a part of her capital--emigrate. Like other

European countries she has learned this lesson by experience. Thus it

often happened when America increased her tariff rates that European

factories, unable to compete, migrated, men and capital, to this

country. It is true that the world market constantly expands, but the

producing capacity of the manufacturing nations also increases, and

competition becomes ever more severe. The more rapidly America invades

the markets which Europe has hitherto held, the more she squeezes them,

the more bitter the feeling against her will become.

That bitterness of feeling (in the conditions preceding the present

war) was more likely to arise in Germany than in England and more

likely in England than in France. We have spoken of these as rival

nations, but there are intensities of rivalry varying in proportion to

the similarity of products and of methods of production. Germany, like

the United States, is a new-comer in international industry, pushing

and aggressive. More scientific and better organised than we, she

possesses far more meagre resources. We both have trusts or cartels,

and both manufacture huge quantities of cheap, standardised products.

Our competition therefore is of the keenest, and is likely to grow more

intense, if, as seems likely, Germany recovers from the effects of this

war. Less keen is our competition with Great Britain. Like an old

firm, grown {62} rich and conservative, Great Britain is not pushing,

not scientific, not well organised. We are gaining on her in those

branches of manufacture which permit standardisation and production in

huge quantities, and have no hope, and but little wish, of competing in

articles of high finish and therefore high labour cost. With France we

compete still less, since much of her export trade is in articles of

taste and luxury, in which we are hopelessly inferior.[2]

In this battle for the world market, the United States has the

disadvantage of coming late and of being intellectually unprepared. On

the other hand, not only have we superior natural resources, but also

the advantage that to us success is not vital. Whatever trade we gain

is a mere improvement of a situation already good. We are playing "on

velvet." Finally, like Germany, we have the advantage of large scale

production by strong corporations working with what is practically a

bounty upon exports. Because of their control of a protected home

market, our great corporations can make their sales at home cover all

initial and constant costs, and as these costs need not be applied to

exports, are able to sell goods cheaper in Rio Janeiro or Lima than in

Chicago or New York. They are able to "dump" their surplus goods.[3]

The opening of the Panama Canal cannot but increase the competition of

the United States especially with the nations bordering on the Pacific

Ocean. From 1897-1901 to 1907-11 the average annual exports from the

United States to these Pacific countries (Mexico, Central America and

Columbia, the remaining West Coast of {63} South America, China, Japan,

the Philippines and British Australasia) increased from 104.2 millions

to 200.2 millions, a growth of 92.1 per cent., while the export from

Germany increased 81.0 per cent. and from the United Kingdom only 51.7

per cent. In the same period our average annual imports from these

countries increased 112.9 per cent. (as compared with 113.9 per cent.

for Germany and 62.5 per cent. for the United Kingdom).[4] The trade

with these Pacific countries lies largely with the United Kingdom, the

United States and Germany (in the order named) and the United States

seems to be slowly moving forward to first place.[5] What progress the

United States has made, moreover, has been achieved under certain great

disabilities which the Panama Canal removes. "By present all-sea

routes New York is, in general, at a disadvantage compared with

Liverpool."[6] New York by the Suez route is 3 days further away from

Australasia (for ten knot vessels) than is Liverpool; by the Panama

route New York is from 9 to 12 days nearer. For points on the west

coast of North and South America, New York is one and a half days

nearer than is Liverpool by the all-sea route and about eleven days

nearer by the Panama route. When all the conditions of distance,

speed, cost of coal, tolls, etc., are considered, it is found that the

Panama Canal gives in many parts of the world an advantage to New York

over Liverpool, Antwerp and Hamburg. The result is an impulse towards

a keener American competition in the Pacific trade.

If our foreign commerce was gaining before the war, it has made even

greater progress since the outbreak of {64} hostilities. While

Germany's foreign commerce has been temporarily destroyed and that of

Great Britain has been hampered by the war, our total commerce has

immensely increased. In the year 1915 we exported over a billion

dollars in excess of our exports of 1913, our exports in the latter

year exceeding those of the United Kingdom or of any other country in

any year of its history.[7] This development, it is true, was abnormal

and consisted partly in increases in prices and temporary deflections

in trade. Nevertheless, while many American industries, especially

those engaged in the manufacture of war munitions, will suffer severely

at the end of the war, and while our export of such commodities will

dwindle, the war cannot but result in a relative advantage to American

manufacturers of export commodities.

Moreover, the war by destroying established connections between neutral

countries and their natural purveyors of manufactured goods in Europe

has opened the way to a future extension of American export. Like a

protective tariff, it gives an initial advantage to Americans, and

helps them to overcome the early handicaps. It induces American

manufacturers to think in terms of foreign markets instead of

concentrating their attention upon a protected home market. In the

beginning, it is true, the buying capacity of certain countries, such

as those of South America, was diminished by the shattering of

financial arrangements with Europe. But such a condition is purely

temporary. There will always be a demand for {65} the wheat, corn,

meats, hides and wool of Argentine, for the copper and nitrates of

Chile, for the coffee and rubber of Brazil, for the wool of Uruguay,

for the sugar and cotton of Peru, for the tin of Bolivia, for the beef

and tagua nuts of Venezuela and Colombia. So long as they sell raw

materials, these countries will furnish a demand for finished products.

American manufacturers are to-day determined to secure an increased

share of this expanding market.[8] They are slowly learning that you

cannot push your goods, in South America let us say, unless you learn

to pack your goods, have studied local requirements, are willing to

print catalogues in Spanish and Portuguese, and have your salesmen know

these languages. In the past Americans have been hampered by their

unwillingness or inability to extend long credits, but this drawback is

being removed by the improvement of banking facilities. The

government, moreover, now seeks actively to promote American trade with

foreign countries, and especially with Latin America. A new merchant

marine is expected to give additional facilities to American exporters

and enable them to meet their British and German competitors on more

nearly equal terms. Moreover, the United States is learning that in

the export trade co-operation is desirable, and the {66} Federal Trade

Commission seems about to grant permission to manufacturers to combine

for the conduct of business in foreign countries.[9]

All this does not mean that American manufacturers are completely to

displace their European competitors in South America and other markets.

Competition after the war will be severe, and whatever the course of

wages and employment in Europe, a measure of success for industrial

countries like Great Britain, Germany and Belgium is absolutely

essential to the maintenance of their populations. Desperate efforts

will be made by these nations to re-establish their foreign business.

A great part of South America is as near to London and Rotterdam as to

New York, and much of the trade and of its future increase will revert

to Europe. In the years to come, however, more than in the present or

past, the United States will be a formidable competitor for the

world-markets, and will incur enmity and jealousy in the attempt to

maintain and improve its position.

{67}

A similar development is taking place in the field of investment. In

former years, British, French, Dutch, Belgian and German financiers

were requested, indeed begged, to invest their surplus capital in

American enterprises. To these financiers we went cap in hand, and

they did not lend their money cheaply. The complementary relation

between lending Europe and borrowing America was productive of the

friendship of mutual benefit. To-day we are still a debtor nation, but

only in the sense that the great financier is a debtor. We ourselves

have a large capital, and in the main go to Europe merely for the sale

of safer and less remunerative bonds, while the common stock of new

enterprises is likely to remain in America. Or we graciously "let

Europe in on a good thing," conferring, not asking, a favour. In the

meantime, we are paying off our indebtedness as is indicated by the

balance of trade, which since 1876 has almost invariably been strongly

in our favour.[10]

The war has still further reduced our foreign obligations. During the

two years ending June 30, 1916 our excess of exports over imports was

over three and one-quarter billions of dollars. Moreover, in 1915 we

did not incur, as ordinarily, a large debt as a result of the

expenditures of Americans in Europe. The result of this development

has been twofold; a considerable transfer of European holdings of

American securities to Americans, and the direct loan of American

capital to Europe. While it is impossible to quote exact figures, the

American debt to Europe can hardly have been reduced during the two

years ending August 1, 1916, by less than two to {68} two and a half

billions, or perhaps a third, or even a half, of our former debt to

Europe.[11]

In the meantime the United States though still a debtor nation has also

become a creditor nation. Just as Germany, before the war, borrowed

from France and loaned to Bulgaria and Turkey, so the United States,

while still owing Europe, invested in Mexico, Canada and South America.

It is probable that by 1914 considerably over one and a quarter billion

dollars of American capital was invested in Canada, Mexico, Cuba and

the Republics of {69} Central and South America, not including the

capital represented by the Panama Canal.[12]

Even to-day (Nov. 1, 1916) there is still a probable excess of our

debts over our credits with foreign nations of at least two billions of

dollars. In comparison with our total wealth, however (estimated by

the census of 1910 at 207 billions and since then largely increased),

this indebtedness seems comparatively small. The national income is

rapidly expanding and as the chance to secure exceptionally large

profits in railroad and industrial enterprises diminishes there is an

increased temptation for surplus capital to flow abroad. Whether or

not we shall again have recourse to the fund of European capital in

developing our immense resources, it is hardly to be doubted that we

shall increasingly invest in foreign countries, and especially in

Mexico, and elsewhere in the Americas.[13]

Such a development is entirely legitimate and within bounds desirable

both for the United States and to the countries to which our capital

(and trade) will go. The possible field of investment in Latin America

and the Orient, to say nothing of other regions, is still immensely

great, and as capital develops these areas their {70} international

trade will also grow. There is no reason why the United States should

not take its part both in the investment of capital and the development

of trade with these non-industrial countries.

As we so invest and trade, however, we must recognise the direction in

which our policy is leading us and the dangers, both from within and

without, that we are liable to incur. The more we invest the more we

shall come into competition with the investing nations of Europe. We

are already urged to put capital into South America on the just plea

that trade follows investment, and the same forces that are pushing our

trade outward will seek opportunities for investment in the mines and

railroads of the politically backward countries. Like European

nations, we too shall seek for valuable concessions, and may be tempted

(and herein lies the danger) to use political pressure to secure

investment opportunities. What happened in Morocco, Persia, Egypt,

where the financial interests of rival nations brought them to the

verge of war, may occur in Mexico, Venezuela or Colombia, and the

United States may be one of the parties involved.

We seem thus to be entering upon an economic competition not entirely

unlike that which existed between Germany and England. We too have

gone over to a policy of extending our foreign markets and of

protecting our foreign investments. More and more we shall be

interested in politically and industrially backward countries, to which

we shall sell and in which we shall invest. Inevitably we shall face

outwards. We shall not be permitted by our own financiers,

manufacturers and merchants, to say nothing of those of Europe, to hold

completely aloof. We have seen, even in the present Mexican crisis,

how American investment tended to precipitate a conflict. We have

learned the same lesson from England, {71} France and Germany. As we

expand both industrially and financially beyond our political borders

we are placed in new, difficult and complicated international

relations, and are forced to determine for ourselves the role that

America must play in this great development. We can no longer stand

aside and do nothing, for that is the worst and most dangerous of

policies. We must either plunge into national competitive imperialism,

with all its profits and dangers, following our financiers wherever

they lead, or must seek out some method by which the economic needs and

desires of rival industrial nations may be compromised and appeased, so

that foreign trade may go on and capital develop backward lands without

the interested nations flying at each other's throat. Isolation,

aloofness, a hermit life among the nations is no longer safe or

possible. Whatever our decision the United States must face the new

problem that presents itself, the problem of the economic expansion of

the industrial nations throughout the world.

[1] This comparison is not exact, since the British statistics include

articles under manufactures which we do not include, and exclude

articles which we include. I cite these figures merely to show that

there is a vast difference in the relative importance to the United

Kingdom and the United States of their export of manufactures, but not

to show exactly what that difference is. Similarly the comparison

above between the total product of American manufacturing and our

export of manufactures is approximate.

[2] See an analysis--let us say of Argentine trade.

[3] On the other hand the very extension of our home market tends to

make us negligent of foreign exports of manufactures and to consider

the profits from this business as a mere by-product. A large and

successful foreign market can be maintained only by careful study and

continuous work.

[4] Hutchinson (Lincoln), "The Panama Canal and International Trade

Competition," p. 105 _et seq._ New York, 1915.

[5] Despite the fact that as yet the _absolute_ increase is greater in

the British than in the American trade with these countries.

[6] Hutchinson (Lincoln), _op. cit._

[7] From 1914 to 1916 our exports of merchandise increased from 2365 to

4334 millions of dollars (an increase of 83 per cent.) and our balance

of exports over imports rose from 471 to 2136 millions (an increase of

354 per cent.). Monthly Summary of Foreign Commerce of the United

States, June, 1916. (Corrected to Aug. 9, 1916, subject to revision.)

[8] "In spite of inexperience, crude methods, lack of banks and of

ships we have made notable gains in South American trade. There seems

to be no reason to question the probability of a continued rapid

increase during the next few years.... The process of building and

making more efficient our own manufacturing plants has been carried

far, so that we are prepared, in the opinion of competent judges, to

proceed more rapidly than ever with the production of goods for foreign

markets."--William H. Lough, "Banking Opportunities in South America,"

Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (Dept. of Commerce), Special

Agents Series No. 106, Washington, 1915, p. 7.

[9] In a recent address (see date) to the American Iron and Steel

Industry, Mr. Edwin W. Hurley, vice-chairman of the Federal Trade

Commission, points out how during the last quarter of a century the

Germans have co-ordinated their foreign trade, with the result that of

the steel business 90 per cent. has been brought under a single

control. The effect has been a victory for the German over the British

export business. Mr. Hurley states that while a constructive programme

has been worked out by the Interstate Commerce Commission for the

railroads, and co-operation among the farmers has been stimulated by

the Department of Agriculture, the manufacturing industries concerned

in the export trade are hampered by provisions of the Anti-Trust Law.

"Is it reasonable to suppose," he asks, "that Congress meant to

obstruct the development of our foreign commerce by forbidding the use

in export trade of methods of organisation which do not operate to the

prejudice of the American public, are lawful in the countries where the

trade is to be carried on, and are necessary if Americans are to meet

competitors there on equal terms?"--New York _Evening Sun_, June 21,

1916.

[10] In the last forty years the balance has been against us in only

three years, 1888, 1889 and 1893. The real balance is not nearly so

great as the apparent balance, but there can be little doubt that it

represents a considerable repayment of the principal of our great debt

to Europe.

[11] According to W. Z. Ripley the American debt to Europe amounted in

1899 to $3,100,000,000 of which $2,500,000,000 was owed to England,

$240,000,000 to Holland, $200,000,000 to Germany, $75,000,000 to

Switzerland, $50,000,000 to France, and $35,000,000 to the rest of

Europe. After 1899 there was a reduction in the amount of European

holdings of American securities (mostly railroad bonds and stocks), but

since 1907 there was again an increased purchase, so that by 1914 the

American debt to Europe was considerably greater than it had been in

1899. See New York _Journal of Commerce_, Dec. 6, 1911. Also, Hobson,

C. K., "The Export of Capital." New York, 1914, p. 153-5. According

to a compilation made by President L. F. Loree of the Delaware and

Hudson Railroad, the American railroad securities formerly held in

foreign hands but which were absorbed by the American market during the

eighteen months ending July 31, 1916, amounted to $1,288,773,801 par

value and to $898,390,910 market value. The railroad securities

remaining abroad (July 31, 1916), amounted to $1,415,628,563 par value

with a market value of $1,110,099,090. In other words according to

these statistics of returned securities (which Mr. Loree believes are

largely underestimated) about 45 per cent. (market value) of the

railroad securities held abroad on January 31, 1915, had been returned

eighteen months later. (New York _Times_, Sept. 25, 1916.) The New

York _Times_ states that "it is high banking opinion that at the

outbreak of the war, the total of industrial securities held abroad

amounted to about 25 per cent. of the railroad securities, and that

the liquidation of industrials since has been in about the same

proportion to the total as the liquidation of rails." On this basis

the foreign holdings of American railroad and industrial securities on

July 31, 1916, would have amounted to only $1,375,000,000 (market

value).

[12] For data used as the basis of this estimate, see Hobson, C. K.,

"Export of Capital" (p. 153 and following), together with sources there

cited.

[13] "The adoption of the Federal reserve system has ... released and

made available for other forms of financing great sums which were

formerly tied up in scattered reserves. We have only to look at the

monetary history of the German Empire during the last forty years to

see how powerful an influence on industry, trade, and investment is

exerted by the centralisation and control of bank reserves. The London

_Statist_ has calculated the ultimate increased lending power of

American banks, under the Federal reserve system, at

$3,000,000,000."--Lough, _op. cit._, p. 8.

{75}

PART II

THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM

CHAPTER VI

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD

For decades, the foreign and domestic policies of the United States

were determined by our ambition to subdue and people a wilderness. Our

immediate profit, our ultimate destiny, our ideals of liberty,

democracy and world influence, were all involved in this one effort.

To us the problem was one of national growth. To-day we are beginning

to realise that this Western movement of ours affected all industrial

nations, and was only a part of a vaster world movement--an economic

revolution, which has been developing for more than a century. That

revolution is the opening up of distant agricultural lands and the

binding of agricultural and industrial nations into one great economic

union. It is a world integration.

To this world development the crude physical hunger of the Western

populations has contributed. The urbane Chinese official, who voices

the sentiments of Mr. Lowes Dickinson, attributes Europe's solicitous

interference in China to the fact that the Western World cannot live

alone. "Economically," he says, "your (Western) society is so

constituted that it is constantly on the verge of starvation. You

cannot produce what you need to consume, nor consume what you need to

produce. It is matter of life and death to you to find markets in

which you may dispose of your manufactures, and from which you may

derive your food and raw material. Such a {76} market China is, or

might be; and the opening of this market is in fact the motive, thinly

disguised, of all your dealings with us in recent years. The justice

and morality of such a policy I do not propose to discuss. It is, in

fact, the product of sheer material necessity, and upon such a ground

it is idle to dispute."[1]

Necessity is a large and a vague word; it may mean any degree of

compulsion or freedom. Yet the Chinese official is right when he

emphasises the immensity of the economic forces driving the Western

nations outward. Not adventure, ambition or religious propagandism

will account for the full momentum of this movement. Back of the

missionaries, traders, soldiers, financiers, diplomats, who are opening

up "backward" countries stand hundreds of millions of people, whose

primary daily needs make them unconscious imperialists.

At the bottom this outward driving force is the breeding impulse, the

growth of population. In 1800, one hundred and twenty-two millions of

people lived in western Europe, whereas in 1900 the population was two

hundred and forty millions,[2] and the rate of increase is still rapid.

The population has doubled; the area has remained the same. The new

millions cannot be fed or clothed according to their present standard

of living unless food and raw materials come from abroad. They depend

for their existence on outside agricultural countries.

This increase of European population, moreover, has been a net

increase, after emigration has been deducted. {77} Although during the

last century tens of millions of immigrants have gone from western

Europe to the United States, Canada, Brazil and the Argentine; the home

population has increased by over one hundred and seventeen millions and

is to-day increasing by twenty millions a decade.[3] For all of these

twenty millions no sufficient outlet can be found either in old or in

new lands. The problem, therefore, is not to find homes for them

abroad but to secure their existence at home. And this existence can

only be secured by raising the necessary food in distant agricultural

countries and by turning over a large part of western Europe to

manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Colonisation, imperialism,

the opening up of new agricultural countries, is therefore the other

side of industrialism.

The present revolution in the world to-day is thus in a real sense a

sequel to the industrial revolution, which gave birth to our modern

industry. That imposing industry depends upon non-industrial

populations, who produce food, cotton, wood and copper, and exchange

them for manufactured goods. Since the people who fashion and

transport products must be fed by those who raise them, agricultural

production must be stimulated at home and abroad. The nation must

expand economically. This expansion, which is broader than what is

usually called imperialism, is not a merely political process. It

takes small account of national boundaries, but develops farming

wherever possible.

The movement is vast and intricate: Commerce {78} between industry and

agriculture is carried to the outermost parts of the earth; Africa is

divided up, colonies, dependencies and protectorates are acquired;

agriculture is promoted in politically independent countries, and an

internal colonisation, a colonisation within one's own country, occurs

simultaneously. In Australia, the Canadian West, in Argentine, in

Siberia settlers lay virgin fields under the plough, and the new lands

are bound commercially to the great complex of Western industrial

nations.

They are also bound psychologically. As the machine which conquered

the nation now conquers the world, so the spirit of Manchester and

London and of Pittsburgh and New York rules ancient peoples, breaking

up their rigid civilisations, as it rules naked savages in the Congo

forests. It is a materialistic, rationalistic, machine-worshipping

spirit. The unconscious Christian missionaries to China, who teach the

natives not to smoke opium and not to bind the feet of their women, are

unwittingly introducing conceptions of life, as hostile to traditional

Christianity as to Confucianism or Buddhism. They are teaching the

gospel of steam, the eternal verities of mechanics, and the true

doctrine of pounds, shillings and pence. Feudalism, conservatism,

family piety, are dissolved; and, as the conquering mobile

civilisations impinge upon quiescent peoples, new ambitions and desires

are created among populations hitherto content to live as their

forefathers lived. These desires are the inlet of the restless

discontent which we call European civilisation. When the ancient

peoples, civilised or not, desire guns, whiskey, cotton goods, watches

and lamps, their dependence upon Western civilisation is assured.

Bound to the industrial nations, they toil in mines or on tropical

plantations that they may buy the goods they have learned to want, and

that Europe may live.

{79}

In this cosmopolitan division of labour, which destroys the old

economic self-sufficiency of nations, England took the lead. A hundred

years ago, when the British agriculturist sold his produce to the

British manufacturer in return for finished wares, and foreign commerce

was insignificant, the population was limited by the food it could

produce. Every increase in the number of Englishmen meant recourse to

less fertile fields, an increase in rents, a lowering of wages and a

resultant pauperism. The hideous distress during the Napoleonic Wars

and after was largely due to an excessive population striving to live

upon narrow agricultural resources.

The alternative presented was to stop bearing children or find food

abroad; stagnation or industrialism. If England (with Wales) could in

1821 barely support twelve millions, how could she maintain thirty-six

millions in 1911? Only by going over to free trade, by raising her

food and raw materials in countries where land was cheap, and employing

her people in converting these into finished products. To-day three

live in England better than one lived before; on the other hand, a

large part of the food supply is raised abroad.

Had Great Britain literally become "the workshop of the world,"

manufacturing for sixteen hundred million inhabitants, there would have

been no limit to her possible increase in population. No such national

monopoly, however, was possible, or from a world point of view

desirable. Belgium, France, Germany and later other thickly populated

countries were also faced with the choice between stagnation and

industrialism, and as English machines, English industrial methods and

English factory organisation could be imported, these nations, one

after another, went over to manufacturing, ceased to export food and

{80} began to import both food and raw materials, competing with Great

Britain for industrial supremacy.

These competing industrial nations had a great common interest, to

increase the total food and raw materials to be bought and therefore

the manufactured products to be sold. The greater the development of

foreign agriculture the better for industry in all these nations. To

secure this agricultural base abroad, the nation was not compelled to

establish its own colonies, for Belgium and Holland could buy food and

raw materials even if the Congo and Java were nonexistent. As a

consumer it made little difference to England whether she got her wheat

from Russia or India, or her sugar from Germany or Mauritius, so long

as the supply was plentiful, cheap and constant. Actually a large part

of the food supply came from politically independent countries, the

United States alone increasing its food exports from fifty-one millions

of dollars in 1860 to five hundred and forty-five millions in 1900, and

its cotton in equal ratio.

But as American economic development proves, it is difficult to

maintain this common agricultural base. The agricultural nation, in

the temperate zone, grows in population, converts itself into an

industrial community, and not only consumes its own food and raw

materials but draws upon the common agricultural fund of the older

industrial nations. To-day the United States is rapidly lessening its

food exports, is increasing its imports of sugar, coffee, tea, fish,

and other foods, and is thus forcing industrial Europe to find a new

agricultural base.

This conversion of agricultural into semi-industrial nations proceeds

rapidly. Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Japan, even Russia, increase

their manufacturing, and intensify the demand for the world's supply of

raw materials. It is a normal and in present circumstances an

inevitable {81} process. When, however, the exportable supply of food

and raw material of an agricultural country dwindles, a new equilibrium

must be established. New states, territories, colonies, hitherto

exporting but little agricultural produce, are opened and their

production stimulated. From Russia, the Danube Valley, Canada,

Australia, Brazil, Argentine and many parts of Africa, new supplies of

raw material are secured. Fresh sources are also discovered for the

production of fodder, flax, cotton, wool and ores. It is an

equilibrium, forever destroyed and forever re-established, between an

increasing number of industrial nations with increasing populations and

new agricultural bases, upon which the superstructure of the world's

export industry is reared.

It is not, however, by the sale of present manufactured goods alone

that the industrial nations can secure their foreign food. One may own

abroad as well as earn abroad. An Englishman with a thousand acres in

North Dakota or Alberta may export the wheat that he raises exactly as

though the farm were in Devon. If he owns shares in the Pennsylvania

Railroad, he may with his dividends purchase wheat, which he may ship

to his own country without exporting commodities in return. The true

economic dominion of England extends wherever Englishmen hold property.

Subject to the laws of the land where the property is held, this

ownership gives the same claim to the product of industry as does an

investment at home.

As we read the imperialistic literature of to-day, we discover that the

chief emphasis is laid on the great value of new countries as a field

for this sort of profitable investment. Investment, not commerce, is

the decisive factor, and money is to be made out of opportunities to

build railroads, open mines, construct harbours and irrigate arid

districts. The diamond mines of the Transvaal were more {82}

attractive to the English than the chance to trade, and what was of

immediate value in Morocco were the iron mines and future railways and

not the right to sell tallow candles to the Berbers.

In large part this foreign investment of capital has the effect of

broadening the agricultural base. While to the individual investor,

capital export means getting eight per cent. instead of four, and to

the promoter, a chance to make a few hundred thousand dollars or

pounds, to the industrial nation it means that a fund is created which

will help pay for a steady flow of agricultural products and raw

materials. To the whole complex of industrial nations and to the world

at large it means even more. The export of capital increases the

capacity of the agricultural nation to serve as a feeder to all

industrial peoples. It provides cheap transportation and improved

agricultural machinery. Had Great Britain not invested in American

railways during the fifties the United States would have exported less

food to Europe in the seventies. Freight rates dropped and the

industrial nations were flooded with cheap wheat. British capital in

American railways aided British manufacturing more than if the same

capital had been placed at home. To-day for the same reason the

process continues elsewhere. In Russia, South East Europe, Canada,

Australia, South America, Asia and Africa, capital, furnished by the

industrial countries, is increasing the production and exportation of

food and of raw materials, and is thus indirectly promoting the

industry of western Europe.[4]

{83}

Such investment abroad is not new. In the Middle Ages the bankers of

Northern Italy, and later of Spain and Portugal advanced small sums to

impecunious foreign sovereigns. But the thousand marks borrowed by

Henry V from Genoese merchants, or the loans made by Holland in the

18th Century, did not compare with the vast sums invested by England

since the Napoleonic Wars, nor by other countries since 1850. For, as

in manufacturing, so also in the export of capital, France, Belgium,

Holland, Germany and even the United States entered the field. The

source from which capital could be obtained widened with the increase

in the number of wealthy industrial nations, and the volume of

investment expanded rapidly. The foreign investments of the United

Kingdom, according to an estimate made by Dr. Bowley, amounted in 1854

to two and three-quarter billions of dollars. For 1914, sixty years

later, these holdings were estimated at seventeen and one-half

billions. It is believed that the French have invested some eight

billions of dollars and the Germans four billions.[5] The entire

foreign investment of capital by the industrial nations of Europe

cannot have amounted (in 1914) to less than thirty-two or thirty-five

billions of dollars.[6]

If this great investment were made solely in countries with a highly

developed capitalism, with stable political conditions and strong

economic ambitions, no imperialistic policy would be necessary.

England need not "own" the United States in order to invest here safely

or for purposes of trade. Nor is she under an economic compulsion to

rule Canada or Australasia. Were these British colonies quite

independent politically, Canadians and Australians would {84} still

endeavour to sell wheat and mutton to Europe and to attract and protect

European capital. Their own self-interest, not any outside compulsion,

makes them serve European, in serving their own interests. In Morocco,

on the other hand, and in Tunis, Persia, Jamaica, Senegal and the

Congo, the situation is different. The natives of these lands lack

most of the elements which make for the ordered economic development

demanded by Europe. Under native rule there is governmental

incompetence and venality, disorder, revolt, apathy and economic

conservatism. Foreign investment is impossible and trade precarious.

It is here where the industrial system of Western Europe impinges upon

the backward countries that economic expansion merges into modern

imperialism.

[1] "Letters from a Chinese Official. Being an Eastern View of Western

Civilisation." New York (McClure, Phillips & Co.), 1903, p. 13.

[2] See "Handwoerterbuch der Staatswissenschaften," II, pp. 992, 993,

Third edition, Jena, 1909-1911. Western Europe here includes all of

Europe except Russia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkan

States and Turkey.

[3] The absolute increase in the population of western Europe is itself

increasing. In the decade 1800-1810, the increase was 6.3 millions; in

the nine succeeding decades it was 7.8; 13.5; 11.3; 9.6; 9.7; 11.5;

14.1; 14.5 and 19.0 millions. In the fifty years ending 1850 the

population increased 48.6 millions; in the fifty years ending 1900,

68.7 millions.

[4] Not all foreign investment of capital results or is intended to

result in stimulating agriculture and other extractive industries.

Much of it is spent unproductively on guns, ships and royal and

presidential luxuries, and much in stimulating manufacturing in

agricultural nations, thus narrowing instead of widening the

agricultural base of the capital-exporting countries.

[5] See Hobson, "Export of Capital."

[6] Moreover this investment, until the outbreak of the war, was

rapidly increasing, amounting to no less than $1,500,000,000 a year.

{85}

CHAPTER VII

THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM

"The free West Indian negro," writes Sir Sidney Olivier, "is not only

averse as a matter of dignity to conducting himself as if he were a

plantation slave, and bound to work every day, but also enjoys the fun

of feeling himself a master. And so, on a big sugar estate, when

expensive machinery is running, and the crop has to be worked without

stoppage, or on a banana plantation, when the steamer has been

telephoned at daybreak, and two or three thousand bunches have to be at

the wharf by noon, the negro hands will very likely find it impossible

to cut canes or fruit that morning. It isn't a strike for better

conditions of labour; they may have no grievance; another day they will

turn up all right: but a big concern cannot be run on that basis. That

is the root of the demand for indentured labour in the West Indies."[1]

It is also the root of imperialism. For imperialism from an economic

point of view is in the main a foreign political control to make the

"niggers" work. The industrial nations, desiring food, raw materials,

markets and a field for investment, being thwarted by conditions in

certain backward agricultural countries, seek to remedy these

conditions by means of political sovereignty. It is not necessary to

control well-governed countries which are peopled by economically

ambitious men who will work six {86} days a week, fifty-two weeks in a

year. In politically independent countries, however, and especially in

the tropics, production is rendered ineffective by the disturbed

political conditions, the lack of capital and capitalistic

intelligence, the absence of fixed industrial habits, as well as by a

general inertia and distaste for continuous labour under the hot sun.

As a result, industrial nations are deprived of the markets and food

supplies, which they consider necessary to their development.[2]

No necessity of feeding Europeans appeals to the West Indian negro when

he emerges from his thatched hut after a comfortable night's sleep.

Though unskilled, he is a strong and capable man, willing, when incited

by friendship or gratitude, to incur trouble and endure fatigue. But,

as Olivier points out, "the capitalist system of industry has never

disciplined him into a wage-slave," and perhaps never will. The

tropical negro "has no idea of {87} any obligation to be industrious

for industry's sake, no conception of any essential dignity in labour

itself, no delight in gratuitous toil. Moreover, he has never been

imbued with the vulgar and fallacious illusion which is so ingrained in

competitive industrial societies, that service can be valued in

money.... Work and money are not yet rigidly commensurable in the

consciousness of the African. Half a dollar may be worth one day's

work for him, a second half-dollar may be worth a second day's work,

but a third half-dollar will not be worth a third day's work....

Moreover he lives in climates where toil is exacting, and rest both

easy and sweet. There are few days in the year in England when it is

really pleasant to loaf, and the streets of civilised cities are not

tempting to recumbent meditation."[3]

It is not always necessary for a foreign power to intervene in order to

disturb this "recumbent meditation." In certain tropical and

sub-tropical countries there develops within the nation a group of

exploiters, who control the government, such as it is, and force the

natives to work. The atrocities of the Putumayo district in Brazil

illustrate the capitalistic spirit in its very worst form, as did also

the forced labour on the Yucatan plantations during the Diaz regime in

Mexico. To meet the economic needs of the industrial world, it makes

little difference whether peons are enslaved by Mexican, American or

English capitalists, so long as the output is the same. But native

capitalists are often unable to secure the desired economic result

because they are too ruthless and, through lack of adequate financial

and military resources, cannot maintain order. Despotism tempered by

revolution, oppression interrupted by savage reprisals, is not {88} an

approved economic stimulus. The difficulty in Mexico to-day, as also

in Venezuela and in Colombia, is the laming of industry by frequent

revolutions. It is the same difficulty that was encountered in India,

Persia and Morocco. The East Indian is as unflagging as the French or

Italian peasant, but not until the British occupation could he secure

the legal protection necessary to a higher economic development.

Peace, sanitation, industrial promotion and an economic or legal

compulsion to work constitute the tools of imperialism, as they are

applied to agricultural countries in the tropical and sub-tropical

world.

There is one outstanding difference between temperate and tropical

countries, which gives to modern imperialism its essential character.

Given a low stage of civilisation, temperate lands are likely to be

thinly populated, while tropical countries, however rudimentary their

economic processes, may maintain large, low-grade populations. In the

temperate climes, therefore, the intruder, who is more highly developed

economically, soon outnumbers the natives, while in tropical countries,

the white immigrant, even when he withstands the climate, is scarcely

able to hold his own, and the very improvements which he introduces

lead to an increase in the indigenous population. The white man either

remains above and in a sense outside the population, or loses his

identity by mixing his blood with that of the natives. The result is

the maintenance of a people ethnically distinct from that of the nation

exercising political control.

To just what extent such control is necessary and effective constitutes

a difficult question. It cannot be denied that the export from many

colonies is far greater than would be the case if these had remained

independent. The naturally rich country of Haiti is far less valuable

to the industrial nations than the poorer island of Porto {89} Rico.[4]

In many parts of the world large agricultural resources are unavailable

because owned by uncivilised nations or tribes maintaining their

political independence. Indeed, if an immediate increase in production

and export were the only factor to be considered, a government of all

tropical America by a capable industrial nation, like England or

Germany, would be of distinct advantage. Other considerations,

however, do enter. Even a semi-efficient nation, like Chili or Brazil,

gradually establishes order, secures foreign capital, intelligence and

labour, and develops its resources. As opposed to Europe, the United

States stands in its Monroe Doctrine for the principle that

Latin-American countries, if left independent, will in time develop,

and that a slow evolution may be more advantageous to the world than a

more rapid exploitation under foreign dominion.[5] Ultimately,

however, the capacity of the nation to utilise its resources does

constitute the test which decides whether it shall retain independence

or become subject to foreign domination. It is this test which is

being applied to-day to Mexico and certain other Latin-American

countries.[6]

As yet this imperialistic regime is in its beginning. Food and raw

materials are still mainly derived from {90} independent nations and

from temperate, settlement colonies, in which production is not

affected by political control. The major part of the food-stuffs

imported by Europe come from Russia, the United States, Canada,

Australia, the Argentine, the Balkans; cotton comes chiefly from the

United States; wool from Australia; hides from the Argentine; copper,

coal, wood, oil from countries of temperate climate. More sugar is

actually produced in temperate than in tropical countries, though the

export from tropical countries largely preponderates. Thus the

external commerce of the specifically tropical countries subject to

imperialistic rule is small compared to that of temperate countries

exporting raw materials. India with its developed agricultural system

exports only some $500,000,000 of food and raw materials[7] (in excess

of its imports of like commodities) or about $1.55 per capita, while

the per capita exportation of Roumania is over ten times as great, of

the Argentine about twenty times, and of Australia forty times.[8]

If the present commerce with tropical countries were not to increase,

the new tropical imperialism would have but a slender economic base,

and it might well be questioned whether it was worth Europe's while to

govern hundreds of millions of yellow, brown and black men in all parts

of the globe. But the English colonies in America, two hundred years

ago, also exported little, and a similar immensity of growth may be

expected from the commerce of tropical countries. "As civilisation

advances and population becomes more dense," writes Mr. Edward E.

Slosson,[9] "the inhabitants of temperate zones {91} become necessarily

more dependent on the tropics. Where the sunshine falls straightest

and the rain falls heaviest there the food of the future will be

produced." Cacao, coffee, copra, cotton, rubber, sugar cane, bananas

and other fruits are all becoming increasingly important in our

consumption, and these and other raw materials are the product of a

scientific exploitation of tropical regions.[10]

More and more the West-European nations, as also the United States and

Japan, are realising these immense potentialities. Into many tropical

countries, new crops are introduced, experiment stations established,

railroads built, agricultural machines imported and efforts made not

only to bring new lands into cultivation but also to increase the

output of older lands. The experimental spread of cotton culture is a

case in point. In 1902 the British Cotton Growing Association was

created to promote the growth of cotton in British dependencies. The

fibre is now being raised in Egypt, Northern Nigeria and Central

Africa, while the possible output of West Africa, it is claimed, could

supply all the mills of Lancashire. An ample supply of cotton for many

decades to come seems reasonably assured.

The gradual filling up of the temperate zones emphasises the immense

future possibilities of the tropical regions. According to Mr. Earley

Vernon Wilcox, the total land area of the world is about 52,500,000

square miles (of which about 29,000,000 are considered fertile) and of

this total area about 15,000,000 square miles are to be found in

tropical and sub-tropical regions. "In 1914, the United States

imported tropical agricultural products to the value of $600,000,000,"

and the exports from Ceylon, Brazil, {92} the Dutch East Indies, Cuba,

Hawaii and Egypt were enormous. "The control and proper development of

the Tropics" writes Mr. Wilcox, "is a problem of tremendous

consequences. Year by year more tropical products become necessities

in cold climates. This is apparent from the mere casual consideration

of a list of the commonly imported tropical products, such as cane

sugar, cocoanuts, tea, coffee, cocoa, bananas, pineapples, citrus

fruits, olives, dates, figs, sisal, Manila hemp, jute, Kapok, raffia,

rubber, balata, gutta-percha, chicle and other gums, cinchona, tans and

dyes, rice, sago, cassava, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla

and other spices, oils, such as palm, China wood, candlenut, caster,

olive, cotton, lemon oil, etc."[11]

In estimating the value of the economic gains to an imperialistic

nation, a moralist might be inclined to introduce other factors. The

problem whether a political subjection, which is of the essence of

imperialism, is or is not justified raises an uncomfortable question in

ethics. However carefully native rights are safe-guarded, these

subject races are forced to obey a foreign will not primarily for their

own good but for that of the sovereign power. Several industrial

nations, above all the United States and in second instance, England,

have undoubtedly embarked upon imperialism with a truly missionary zeal

for the welfare of the natives. On the other hand, the twentieth

century outrages in the Congo were almost as bad as the cruelties of

the Conquistadores in Hispaniola and Peru. Even in well-governed

countries, like Egypt, the introduction of European legal systems has

resulted in the expropriation of innumerable small property-holders,

while the increase in population, due to better economic and {93}

sanitary arrangements, has led to an intensification of misery. To

what extent the average _fellah_ of Egypt is better off than under the

reign of Mehemet Ali or of Ismail, how much the Jamaican poor are more

prosperous than the poor of Haiti is at best an unpromising inquiry.

On the whole, there has doubtless been improvement. In Africa

slave-catching has been abolished, and famine and pestilence

circumscribed. But the gain such as it is, has been in the main

incidental, the by-product of an exploitation primarily for the benefit

of others.[12]

Yet however we discuss the moral question, the problem is determined by

quite other considerations. So long as hundreds of millions in the

industrial countries require and demand that these backward countries

be utilised, humanitarian laws will not be allowed to interfere with

the main economic purpose of the colonies. The imperialistic argument

is always the same: the resources of the world must be unlocked. Three

hundred thousand Indians must not be permitted to occupy a land capable

of maintaining three hundred millions of civilised people.[13] {94} The

earth and the fulness thereof belong to the inhabitants of the earth,

and if the product is somewhat unevenly divided, that, the imperialists

assert, is hardly to be avoided. Back of the ethical argument lie

necessity and power. Let the backward countries be exploited with the

utmost speed; in the centuries to come, we will go into these moral

questions at our leisure.

This submission of ethical ideals to economic needs is illustrated in

the prevailing colonial labour policy, which reveals with clarity the

quality and power of the economic impulse to imperialism. The great

industrial nations, having reached the economic stage in which an ample

labour supply can be secured without other compulsion than that of

hunger, accept at home the ideal of a free labour contract, with a

certain protection to the wage-earner. In their colonies, however,

though they may wish to be fair to the natives, one form or another of

forced labour is generally adopted. An African native, who wants

little here below and can get that little easily, is compelled to

neglect or surrender his diminutive banana patch or farm and come to

the European's plantation or mine, or work for nothing or next to

nothing on the public roads. Either this compulsion is exerted by

means of a heavy hut tax, the money to pay which can be obtained only

by wage-labour, or by stringent vagrancy laws, or by a refusal to allow

the natives to become independent proprietors, or by outright

expropriation. In some colonies penal labour contracts are enforced,

and the miserable native who breaks his agreement is imprisoned or

flogged. Credit bondage is also in favour, and no sooner does the

native work off his original indebtedness than he finds that he is more

in {95} debt than ever. Finally if the natives cannot be compelled to

give enough labour, coolies are imported, chiefly from China and India,

and after their period of service are expatriated.

Even a more direct pressure is not always wanting. While the

imperialistic nations theoretically oppose slavery, and have rather

effectively checked the horrible slave trade of the Arabs, they

themselves have not always escaped the temptation to introduce slavery

under new forms. At various times and in various colonies, the

_corvee_ has been adopted both for public and private works, and in the

Belgian Congo a thinly disguised slavery in its most atrocious form has

been adopted. To justify this European slavery, which is infinitely

more brutal than was the mild and customary native slavery, the same

ethical and religious arguments are advanced as were utilised by the

sixteenth century Spaniards in establishing their _encomiendas_. The

natives, especially in Africa, are lumped together as worthless idlers,

and their benevolent rulers are urged to teach these benighted

creatures the Christianity of hard and continuous labour.[14] But the

real motive is to secure the greatest amount of profits for the

investors and of tropical produce for the European {96} populations.

Whether even from this point of view a less exacting and ruthless

labour policy might not be desirable need not here be discussed. What

is immediately significant is the immense power of the forces driving

European nations into colonial policies, intended to increase the

export of tropical products.

Because of this demand for tropical produce, tropical markets, tropical

fields for investment, the vast machinery of imperialism is set in

motion. Because of this demand, present and future, European armies

march over deserts and jungles, and slay thousands of natives in

spectacular _battues_. To satisfy the needs of European populations

and adventurers, millions of brown men toil in the crowded, dirty

cities of India, on sun-lit plantations in Java and Egypt, in the

cotton fields of Nigeria and Togo. To grasp this imperialism, to

realise the big, pulsing, dramatic movement of it, one must view the

peons on hennequin plantations, the barefoot Mexican labourers in

silver mines, the rack-rented fellaheen in the Nile Valley, the patient

Chinese and Japanese toilers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. One

must gain a sense of the dull ambitions and compulsions working on

these men, the desire for the cheap products of Manchester and

Chemnitz, the craving for liquor, the fear of starvation and of the

lash. And as these coloured peoples toil, not knowing for what they

toil, other men in London and Paris, in Berlin, Brussels and New York

are speculating in the securities which represent their toil. They are

buying "Kaffirs" as they once bought "Yankee rails." Seated in their

offices, these white-faced men are irrigating deserts, building

railroads through jungles and wildernesses, and secure in the faith

that all men, black, yellow and brown, can be made to want things and

work for things, are revolutionising countries they have never seen.

Even these organisers, these {97} seemingly omnipotent shapers of the

world, are themselves only half-conscious agents of a vast economic

process not solely desired by a class or nation but dictated by a far

wider necessity. It is a process varied in its many-sided appeal; a

process which reveals itself in the transfusion of capitalistic ideals

by means of little school-houses in the Philippines, by means of the

strict and rather harsh justice in British colonies, by means of the

unconscious teachings of Christian missionaries, by means of the swift

decay of ancient, tenacious faiths. It is a process linking the ends

of the world, uniting the statesmen and financiers of the imperialistic

nation with wretches in the swarming cities of the East, with

half-drunken men seeking for rubber in tangled forests, with negroes

searching over great expanses of country for the ivory tusks of

elephants, with the Kaffirs in the diamond mines who enter naked and

depart naked, and whose bodies are examined each day to discover the

diamonds which might be buried in the flesh. At one end of the line

are the urbane diplomats seated about a table at some Algeciras, at the

other, in the very depths of distant colonies, there is slavery,

flagellation, political and intellectual corruption, missionary

propaganda, and the day to day business and planning of white settlers,

who are anxious to make their fortune quick and get back to "God's own

country." It is a process so vast, so compelling, so interwoven with

the deepest facts of our modern life that our ordinary moral judgments

seem pale and unreal in contact with it. And so too with religion.

Christianity which changed in its passage from Judea to Rome and from

Rome to the Northern Barbarians takes on again a new aspect when

imperialistic nations encounter the peoples they are to utilise. This

imperialistic Christianity defends forced labour and slavery as an

advance over a mere doing nothing. The parable of the ten {98} talents

is the one Christian doctrine in which the imperialist fervently

believes.

This modern imperialism, which compels subject peoples to work at

extractive industries at the behest of the swarming millions of the

industrial nations, which excites, stimulates, urges, pushes, forces

coloured peoples to raise bananas and cotton and buy shirts, gew-gaws,

and whiskey, is at bottom a movement compelled by the economic

expansion and necessity of the older countries. It is an outlet for

the pressure, strain and expansiveness of the growing industrial

nations, an outlet for industrialism itself. It ranges the industrial

nations as a whole against the backward agricultural countries, and

binds them together into a forced union, in which the industrial

nations guide and rule and the backward peoples are ruled.

But while the industrial nations have a common interest in imperialism,

they have also separating and antagonistic interests. Though the

nations would prefer to have any one of their number, England, Germany

or France, rule all tropical countries rather than go without tropical

colonies at all, each nation, for economic, as well as political and

military reasons, desires that it, and not its neighbour and

competitor, should be the supreme Colonial Power. It is because of

this fact that modern imperialism takes on the form of a bitter

nationalistic competition for colonies, and leads to diplomatic

struggles and eventually to war.

[1] "White Capital and Coloured Labour," pp. 80, 81. London, 1910.

[2] The case for tropical imperialism is argued by Dr. J. C. Willis

(Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Ceylon) as follows: "In the

present condition of the world the temperate zones cannot get on

without the products of the tropics. The latter provide many things,

such as rubber, tea, coffee, cinchona, jute, cane-sugar, spices, etc.,

which are among the necessaries of modern civilised life. The need for

these has led to the settlement of Europeans at trading stations in the

tropics, at Calcutta, Malacca, Calabar and many other places. Once

settled there, the insecurity of the traders and the inefficiency of

the natives have led to the conquest of adjacent territories, until now

most of the valuable areas in the tropics are in European or American

hands." The conquering nations "work on the principle of governing the

country for the benefit of the governed; but they must also so arrange

matters that the tropical countries shall take their share in the

progress of the world at large, and produce and export certain

commodities for the benefit of that world which cannot get along

properly without them. If the countries of the tropics can be made to

progress so far that they shall themselves, with their own population,

produce these things, so much the better; _but the things must be

produced_."--"Agricultural Progress in the Tropics,"--_Science_,

London, Vol. V, pp. 48, 49. (My italics.)

[3] "White Capital and Black Labour," pp. 82-83.

[4] In 1911 the exports for Haiti amounted to a little over $3 and in

1912 to a little under $7 per capita; the exports of Porto Rico (to the

United States and foreign countries) amounted to almost $40 per capita.

[5] Historically, of course, this theory was not the real motive behind

the Doctrine. That motive was the unwillingness of the United States

to have strong, military nations in its immediate vicinity.

[6] A failure to meet the requirements of the industrial nations does

not necessarily involve a complete extinction of political

independence. Any measure of control, any merely reserved right, such

as the United States retains in Cuba, may suffice for the purpose.

[7] "Food, drink, tobacco, raw materials and produce and articles

mainly unmanufactured."

[8] Owing to differences in method of classification, these comparisons

are only approximate.

[9] The _Independent_, Oct. 11, 1915.

[10] For a brilliant statement of the growing significance of tropical

products, see Benjamin Kidd, "The Control of the Tropics," New York,

1898, especially Part I.

[11] "Tropical Agriculture," New York and London, 1916, p. 33.

[12] The case is analogous to that of the operation of cotton mills in

the South. Despite low wages and brutal exploitation of children, the

introduction of these mills has automatically raised the standard of

living, but the goal desired was not this but the quickest possible

making of profits.

[13] "No false philanthropy or race-theory," writes Prof. Paul

Rohrbach, one of the more humane of the German imperialists, "can prove

to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic

South African Kaffirs or their primitive cousins on the shores of Lakes

Kiwu or Victoria is more important for the future of mankind than the

expansion of the great European nations, or the white races as a whole.

Should the German people renounce the chance of growing stronger and

more serviceable, and of securing elbow room for their sons and

daughters, because fifty or three hundred years ago some tribe of

negroes exterminated its predecessors or expelled them or sold them

into slavery, and has since lived its useless existence on a strip of

land where ten thousand German families may have a flourishing

existence, and thus strengthen the very sap and force of our

people?"--Rohrbach, "German World Policies" ("Der deutsche Gedanke in

der Welt.") Translated by Edmund von Mach. New York (Macmillan), 1915

(pp. 141-2.)

[14] Prof. Paul S. Reinsch, from whose admirable books I have drawn

extensively in this description of colonial labour, rescues from

undeserved oblivion an article by the Rev. C. Usher Wilson on "The

Native Question and Irrigation in South Africa," published in the

_Fortnightly_ for August, 1903. "A careful study of educated natives,"

writes this pious gentleman, "has almost persuaded me that secular

education is not a progressive factor in social evolution. The

salvation of a primitive people depends upon the force of Christianity

alone, special attention being paid to its all-important rule 'six days

shalt thou labour.' ... In the education of the world it has ever been

true that slavery has been a necessary step in the social progress of

primitive peoples."--Reinsch, "Colonial Administration," New York,

1912, p. 383.

{99}

CHAPTER VIII

IMPERIALISM AND WAR

If the entire imperialistic process could be directed by one omniscient

individual, representing the interest of all industrial and

agricultural countries, the progress of imperialism would be regular,

rapid and easy. Or if one nation, say England, could take over all

colonies and run them in the common interest of the industrial nations

alone, imperialism would be robbed of its greatest peril, that of

embroiling the nations in war. Unfortunately we have hit upon no such

device for preserving the common interest of imperialist nations, while

safe-guarding their separate interests. Each nation desires the

biggest share for itself. Imperialism is directed by the conflicting

ambitions, crude pretensions and confident vanities of selfish nations,

and in the conflicts of interest that break out, the soup is spilled

before it is served.

From an economic point of view, this special interest of the nations in

imperialism, like their common interest, is three-fold: markets for

manufactured products, opportunities to invest capital and access to

raw materials. If trade never followed the flag, if India imported as

much from Germany as from Great Britain, and Madagascar as much from

Austria as from France, if there were an absolutely open door in each

colony and a real as well as legal equality for all merchants, there

would be a weaker competition for the dominion of backward countries.

{100} Germans, Englishmen and Frenchmen might then compete on equal

terms in Morocco, Egypt and Southwest Africa as they compete to-day in

Chile or Argentina. But no such equality exists in countries

controlled by European powers, and many of these colonies are

consciously utilised in a bitter economic competition between the

nations.

To what such competition may lead is suggested in a sensational article

in the _Saturday Review_ of almost twenty years ago. Says the

anonymous author of this article: "In Europe there are two great,

irreconcilable, opposing forces, two great nations who would make the

whole world their province, and who would levy from it the tribute of

commerce. England, with her long history of successful aggression,

with her marvellous conviction that in pursuing her own interests she

is spreading light among nations dwelling in darkness, and Germany,

bone of the same bone, blood of the same blood, with a lesser

will-force, but, perhaps, with a keener intelligence, compete in every

corner of the globe. In the Transvaal, at the Cape, in Central Africa,

in India, and the East, in the islands of the Southern sea, and in the

far Northwest, wherever--and where has it not?--the flag has followed

the Bible and trade has followed the flag, the German bagman is

struggling with the English pedlar. Is there a mine to exploit, a

railway to build, a native to convert from breadfruit to tinned meat,

from temperance to trade-gin, the German and the Englishman are

struggling to be first. A million petty disputes build up the greatest

cause of war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extinguished

to-morrow, the day after to-morrow there is not an Englishman in the

world who would not be richer. Nations have fought for years over a

city or a right of succession, must {101} they not fight for two

hundred and fifty million pounds of yearly commerce?"[1]

No doubt this assertion of a complete opposition between British and

German commerce and investment contains an element of exaggeration. In

1913 England was the greatest consumer of German goods and Germany an

excellent customer of Great Britain and the British colonies. If

Germany were to be extinguished, Englishmen would be poorer, not

richer. Yet the competition between German bagman and English pedlar

is real, and this commercial competition is merely an expression of a

far more significant industrial competition. As German organisation,

science, and technical ability build up iron, steel, machinery,

chemical and other industries, British industry, though still growing,

finds itself circumscribed. If national colonies can be utilised for

special national advantage, financial, industrial or commercial, the

attempt will be made. If trade and investment can be made to follow

the flag, the nation has an interest in securing colonies.

There is always a certain presumption that colonials, partly from

tradition, and partly from commercial patriotism, will deal with their

home country. The merchant in British colonies is familiar with

British firms and trademarks and rather resents the necessity of

becoming acquainted with foreign wares and the standing of foreign

merchants. Prices being equal, we patronise the people we know and

like. Investment also leads to trade. The Englishmen who control the

vast resources of India, tend, without compulsion, to buy of British

merchants. The possession of even a free-trade colony often insures

the retention of its most profitable commerce.

It is true that this presumption in favour of the home {102} nation may

be overborne. Lower prices, better service, a more active and

intelligent business propaganda may divert trade to foreign merchants.

Before the war, German manufacturers found an increasing market in

British colonies, overcoming colonial prejudice as they overcame the

prejudice in Great Britain itself. Geographical nearness is even more

decisive. Thus Canada is economically far more closely bound to the

United States than to England. In 1913-14 we sold Canada $3.11 worth

of goods for every dollar sold by the United Kingdom.[2] To Jamaica

our exports exceeded those of the United Kingdom, while our imports

from the island were over three times as great as the British

imports.[3] The United States profits far more immediately from the

economic development of Canada and Jamaica than does the United

Kingdom.[4]

In the main, however, even under free trade, subtle influences are

constantly at work to bring the colony into closer commercial relations

with the home country. Thus in 1913-14, 64 per cent. of the imports of

British India came from the United Kingdom, and other British

dependencies showed a similar preponderance of trade with Great

Britain.[5] The volume of the entire traffic between the home country

and its colonies is overwhelming. In 1914, the United Kingdom imported

from British {103} possessions no less than L205,173,000, or over 29

per cent. of its total imports, and exported to these British

possessions L179,350,000 or almost 42 per cent. of its total exports

(of British produce).[6] This trade, which is increasing faster than

the total trade of the United Kingdom, is peculiarly valuable. From

her overseas dominions Great Britain secures a far larger proportion of

food products and raw materials than from foreign countries, and to

these overseas dominions she sends a large proportion of manufactured

goods, containing a high percentage of labour. Thus, says Prof.

Reinsch,[7] "From the point of view of the development and prosperity

of national industry it is important that the exports of the nation

should be composed largely of manufactured goods, the value of which

includes as high as possible an amount of labour cost. The export of

raw material, of coal, of food materials, and of machinery used in

factories, cannot be considered of the highest advantage to the

industrial life of a manufacturing country, nor is it most profitable

from a national point of view to furnish foreign countries with ships,

which help to build up their merchant marines." But according to the

figures of 1903 "only 10 per cent. of the exports of British goods to

the colonies consist of those commodities which the national industry

derives relatively the least profit from, while for foreign countries

the figure is 27 per cent."[8]

{104}

The general colonial trend has been in the direction of deliberately

securing by legislative means a preferential advantage for the home

country. "France," writes Dr. Wilhelm Solf, former German Secretary of

State for the Colonies, "has assimilated Algeria and a portion of her

colonies from the point of view of customs. She regards them almost

completely as within her tariff boundaries, which fact gives French

commerce the advantage over that of other nations trading with these

colonies. In regard to her other colonies France has introduced

preferential tariffs favouring the motherland, and reciprocally the

colonies, which amount to as much as 85 per cent. of the normal duties.

In Tunis, likewise, France has favoured her own trade in important

lines, such as grain, by admitting them free of duty when carried in

French bottoms. Portugal has introduced discriminating customs rates

up to 90 per cent. of the regular tariff in favour of her own colonial

shipping. Spain has acted similarly. England also enjoys tariff

advantages as high as 33 per cent. of the normal rate in her

self-governing colonies. She has in this manner secured for British

industry a market which, without this preference, she would not have

been able to maintain to the same degree. Likewise, the United States

has to a large extent assimilated its colonies in customs matters.

Belgium has, it is true, no preferential tariff, but by means of her

extensive system of concessions she has practically precluded the

competition of other states and secured a monopoly in the trade with

her own colonies."[9]

{105}

No such colonial preference amounts to a complete exclusion of the

trade of competitors. The Germans, not the English, are the chief

purchasers of India cotton, and from the German colonies, diamonds go

chiefly to Antwerp, West African copper to the United States and

Belgium, and East African skins and hemp to North America. In many

colonies and dependencies a complete legal equality of trade is

maintained. On the whole, however, whether as a result of tariffs or

of quiet discrimination by local authorities, the foreign merchant

finds obstacles placed in his way and the trade goes to the home

country. Thus in 1914, of Algerian imports 84 per cent. came from

France, while of her exports 79 per cent. went to France.[10] The

trade of all the other French colonies and dependencies tends also to

go to France. Thus of the import of all French colonies and

dependencies (exclusive of Algeria and Tunis) 45 per cent. in 1913 came

from France and French colonies, while of the exports 42 per cent. went

to France and French colonies.[11] Similarly in 1909 of the entire

import and export trade of German colonies (exclusive of Kiau-Chau),

65.3 per cent. were with Germany.[12]

To the citizens of the home country go also the investment

opportunities, the chances to secure concessions for mines, railroads

and tramways. The legal right to these lucrative monopolies inheres in

the nation that develops the backward country. This preferred

position, this assured possession of a sole and undivided privilege is

of the essence of imperialism. All the economic arguments for peace

based upon the theory that trade heals enmities, {106} shatter upon

this fact. Free traders never tire of insisting that trade is

reciprocally advantageous, blessing him who sells and him who buys;

that the more trade there is, the more there is to get. They argue

that England, Germany, America and Japan might continue until the end

of time amicably exporting pianos and gingham aprons to the backward

peoples, and receive in return unimaginable quantities of sugar, rubber

and tobacco. But modern imperialism, extending its dominion ever

further, is dreaming not alone of this field for competitive selling,

but of concessions, monopolies, exclusive privileges, immensely

lucrative pre-emptions. There are whole worlds to exploit, and whoever

rules garners. When France extends her sway over North Africa and

develops these lands, the valuable concessions go to French

corporations. The actual capital used comes in last analysis from the

great capital fund of Western Europe, from French, English, Belgian,

Dutch and German capitalists, and whoever wishes to make four or five

per cent. may lend his money to the banks that lend to the development

companies that invest in the new country. But the big profit--the

cream--does not go to these petty ultimate investors but to the

political and high finance promoters, and these are French if the

enterprise is French. Moreover, trade accompanies and follows

investment, and if France secures control, the imported locomotives,

rails, cars and mining machinery come from France. In Morocco, France

keeps the inside track, as does England in Egypt and India, and Germany

in Togo and East Africa. Let who will pick up the scraps.[13]

{107}

This prevailing monopolistic character of colonial exploitation led

prior to the War of 1914 to great dissatisfaction among those powers,

which were least favoured colonially. In Germany liberal imperialists

like Paul Arndt and Friedrich Naumann bewailed the fact that Germany

was industrially handicapped because of the meagreness of her colonial

possessions. "Germans," complained Prof. Arndt, "receive no railway,

harbour, shipping, telegraph or similar concessions in English,

Russian, French, American and Portuguese colonies. Everywhere citizens

are preferred to foreigners, which is easily explicable and in fact

natural...."[14] As colony after colony is formed, the field for the

free competition of Germany with the world is narrowed, so that at last

only countries like Abyssinia, Siam, China and above all the southern

half of America remain independent and open. The French success in

gaining and closing colonies arouses German envy. Why is France's

colonial empire more than two and a half times as large as that of

Germany? asks Dr. Naumann. How is France ahead of us? "We have beaten

her in the field of battle, but she has recovered diplomatically. She

is weaker in a military sense but in a political sense stronger."[15]

Between envying France her colonial empire and determining at some

favourable opportunity to redress the inequality is but a short step.

To discontent with the present is added fear for the {108} future.

Those nations, which are least blessed with colonies and which lack at

home a broad agricultural base for the support of their industries,

look anxiously towards a possible development, which will rob them not

only of their markets and investment opportunities but also of their

necessary raw materials. To the country ruling the colony belongs in

last instance the right to decide what shall be done with its food and

raw materials. Suppose that Australia, by a special arrangement with

the mother country, lays a heavy duty upon all wool exported to other

countries than Great Britain, and thus makes German competition in the

woollen industry impossible. Suppose the cotton supply of the United

States is rendered dearer by some scheme of valorisation, like that

which Brazil applied to coffee exports, or by action of financial

groups in America, or, given a change in the Federal Constitution, by

an export duty on raw cotton. How then will Germany compete? What

could Germany do if foreign nations shut her off from access to ores,

foods and textiles? How could she solve the problem of a dwindling

supply of iron ore? As population outstrips home production of raw

materials, the dependence of industrial nations upon the countries

producing such materials increases, and the fear arises that such

foreign resources will be monopolised, and the excluded industrial

nations forced to stop their advance and to descend in the scale of

power. As this fear grows, the backward countries cease to be regarded

as a common agricultural base and become merely separate national

preserves. Each nation strives by means of an exclusive possession of

colonies to become self-sufficing. The competition for colonies

becomes a struggle for national existence.

In such a struggle for national existence, all vested rights go by the

board. A nation needing outlets will pay {109} small heed to maxims

concerning peace, internationalism and the status quo; it will ask for

the title deeds of the nations that own what it wants. So long as

Germany, for example, felt that colonies were absolutely essential to

her future prosperity, it mattered little to her that England and

France had been first in the field, that they had planted and sowed in

foreign fields while she was still struggling to secure national unity.

"Where were you when the world was divided?" the Germans asked

themselves, and they came to the belief that their own economic needs

justified their colonial ambitions, wherever those ambitions might lead

them. Rather than have the world shut to them they were willing to

make sacrifices and incur dangers. War, they held, was better than

stagnation, poverty and famine.

But for a country like Germany colonial ambitions conflicting with

those of other European powers are especially dangerous, because a

struggle for Africa or Asia means battles in Champagne, Westphalia or

Posen. "The future of Germany's world policy," said an author who

wrote under the pseudonym "Ruedorffer," "will be decided on the

continent. German public opinion has not yet fully comprehended the

interdependence of Germany's military peace in Europe and her freedom

of action in her foreign enterprises."[16]

Though Bismarck understood this interrelation, he was primarily

interested in the European and not in the colonial situation.

"Bismarck," wrote Ruedorffer, "looked upon the consolidation of

Germany's newly acquired unity as the first and principal task after

the fortunate war with France. To divert the attention of France from

the Rhine {110} border, he favoured, as much as he could, French

expansion in Africa and Asia. When, toward the end of his career, he

attempted to secure, for a future colonial activity of Germany, a few

African tracts which had not yet been claimed by any other power, he

was extremely careful not to encroach upon England's interests. He

avoided pushing Germany's claims beyond Southwest Africa and annexing

the _hinterland_ of the Cape Colony, a territory to-day known as

Rhodesia.... Bismarck kept Germany's world policies within the limits

which, according to his opinion, were prescribed by her continental

policies."

As German colonial ambition grew, however, partly as a result of her

fear of exclusion from colonial markets and sources of supply, she

began to fear that she might raise up enemies in Europe itself. "In

every enterprise," wrote Ruedorffer, "whether on African, Turkish,

Persian, or Chinese soil, Germany's policy will necessarily have to

take account of the presumable reaction on the European political

constellation. If Germany encounters Russian interests in Turkey, in

Persia, or in China, she will thereby bind Russia still more closely to

immutable France; if she infringes upon England's interests in

Mesopotamia, she will see England on the side of her opponents." "This

reciprocal dependence of world policies and continental policies

constitutes, if you please, a _circulus vitiosus_, the vicious circle

of Germany's foreign policy. German enterprises abroad react on the

continental policy, and it is under pressure from the continental

policy that Germany's world policies find their limitations."

As a result Germany, with potential enemies on all sides, was

constantly oppressed by the _cauchemar des coalitions_, the nightmare

of jealous hostile alliances.

It is this dependence of colonial upon continental politics that

intensifies the dangers of imperialism, increases {111} its

ruthlessness and recklessness, and causes it to become a deadly

conflict, with diplomacy _a la maniere forte_ in the foreground, and in

the background, war.

The danger of war as a result of imperialism is immensely increased by

the disunion and disequilibrium of Europe. The continental nations are

always embattled and ready to strike. It is not an accidental or

transient condition but is rooted deep in geographical, historical and

economic causes. Europe, since history began, has been overfilled with

clashing peoples and races with variant beliefs, traditions and

languages, and with opposed economic interests. To grow, to prevent

others from growing, these crowded groups went to war.

It was no fault or vice of the Europeans, but merely the tragic fact

that there was no firm basis for European union. After the downfall of

the Western Roman Empire, no power was strong enough to dominate

Europe. The dreams of universal dominion of a Charlemagne and of a

Rudolf of Hapsburg remained dreams; the great, loose federations like

the Holy Roman Empire were no match for the smaller but more compact

nations, which grew up after the Middle Ages. These new nations,

moreover, inevitably meant increased antagonism, a perpetual struggle

for more territory, more trade, more gold; a despotic, militaristic,

fighting society. The age of the rise of nations was also that of

professional armies under the direction of a despot, and of wars for

the spoliation of still unorganised peoples, like the Germans and the

Italians.

If European union was difficult to achieve in past centuries, it has

become even more difficult to-day. The last century has been the

century of nationalities, a period during which nations and

nationalistic groups developed consciousness. Group consciousness is,

of course, no new thing, for all groups, possessing survival quality,

have {112} conceit, self-esteem and veneration for the bond that unites

them and for all qualities, characteristics, experiences and

institutions which distinguish them. To-day this group consciousness

has become national consciousness, and the impulse towards

nationalistic expression spreads and makes itself felt not only in

organised nations but also among submerged, conquered and dispersed

peoples like the Czechs, Poles, Finns and Irish. The clash of Europe's

hundreds of millions for a satisfactory existence upon an insufficient

area is intensified by the marshalling of these millions into

nationalistic groups, speaking different languages and ruled by hostile

traditions.

The antagonism is the worse because in many parts of Europe history and

geography have conspired to jumble ethnic and linguistic groups without

mixing them. In Bohemia, East Prussia, Dalmatia, Macedonia and

Lorraine, hostile groups intermingle without fusing. Though the last

century has brought about a certain approximation of state boundaries

to the boundaries of nationalities, the process is far from complete.

About many nations there is a fringe of people of like nationality

subject to other states. Roumania, Servia, Italy, each has its

_Irredenta_; Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey are loose bundles of

nationalities, hating each other, while the Balkan States cannot

discover any nationalistic principle upon which to divide up Macedonia.

Each nationality seeks independence and strength to maintain itself

against the encroachment of rivals, and this desire for

self-preservation through size, causes a nationality, which has

attained to nationhood, to oppress smaller nationalistic groups within

its borders. The condition is artificial and anomalous. Absurd

nationalistic claims are advanced in defence of aggression, and while

learned Pan-Slavs convert Balkan {113} dwellers into Russians, the

Dutch, Flemings and Danes are proved by Pan-Germans to be only Germans

once removed.

The progress of democracy has intensified this nationalistic strife and

made it a matter of _amour propre_. So long as no citizen had rights,

it mattered little whether the King were German or Hungarian. With the

participation of the people in government, however, the subject

nationalities feel themselves disgraced. The Pole longs for a free

democratic Poland; he is not content to become German, Austrian or

Russian. Rather than surrender his nationality he is willing to tear

up the map of Europe and thrust the world into war.

In this condition we have the seeds of perpetual conflict in Europe.

Partly for the sake of increasing the national strength and partly for

the benefit of certain financial groups, the lesser nationalities are

ruthlessly exploited by the dominating nationality within a given

country. The oppression of Roumanians and Slavs by the Magyar ruling

classes of Hungary causes a deep revulsion of feeling in Roumania,

Servia and other countries across the border, just as the ambitions of

Pan-Germans to make Germany a nationalistic state arouse the

indignation of the French and the fears of the Dutch and Danes.

Moreover the nationalistic groups often discover that they have

antagonistic economic interests.

The danger of this situation is immensely increased by the fact that

all these hostile nations impinge territorially on one another, and

modern warfare gives an enormous advantage to the nation gaining the

initial success. Austria, Belgium, France may be overrun and

permanently defeated by a campaign of six or seven weeks, and it is

difficult thereafter to retrieve these early defeats. {114} European

nations therefore live in the fear of immediate attack and conduct a

hair-trigger diplomacy.

This is the true interpretation of _Realpolitik_, of a nationally

selfish policy, devoid of sentiment and laying an excessive emphasis

upon immediate and material ends. A nation in danger of annihilation

cannot indulge in the luxury of sentiment, cannot consider long time

views, cannot be over-generous or trust to the generosity of rivals.

Each nation is compelled to enter into offensive and defensive

alliances, and these alliances, perpetually suspecting each other, are

compelled to prepare for instant war.

But preparation for war under such conditions makes war inevitable. If

a nation believes that it is to be assailed, five, ten or fifteen years

from now, it is tempted to precipitate the "inevitable" war at the

moment when its chances are the best. The doctrine of "the war of

prevention," however perilous, is, in the prevailing circumstances,

natural. It is meeting a supposedly inevitable danger half way.

Still another element adds to the menace of imperialism. Just as a

successful imperialistic policy depends upon the ability of the

European nation to defend itself at home, so also it depends upon

access to the colonies, upon a control of the seas. Had Spain been a

hundred times as powerful on land as the United States, she still could

not have defended Cuba. Were Germany to secure valuable colonies, she

could not be sure of their retention against England (which lies on

Germany's lines of communication), so long as the British possessed an

overwhelming naval supremacy. It was therefore natural, and indeed

inevitable, that, sooner or later, German colonial ambitions should

find expression in a naval expansion, which, whatever the intentions of

its promoters, was potentially a menace to the British Empire and even

to the very {115} existence of England. The desire for imperialistic

expansion thus led, in the absence of any formula of reconciliation

upon a higher plane, to an irrepressible conflict between England and

Germany, in short, to a world war.

Herein lay and still lies the peril of imperialism, the danger that for

fifty years to come Europe, and perhaps America also, will be again and

again embroiled in wars immeasurably more destructive than were the

long colonial wars of the eighteenth century. The present world war

does not automatically end the imperialistic struggle. There is China

to consider, there is the independence of Latin America, to say nothing

of colonies securely held for the time being by one or another of the

European powers. The allies, if successful in this war, will not

necessarily remain allies. The ambitions of England, of Russia, of

Japan, not to speak of France, Germany, Italy and perhaps the United

States, may come into conflict. Nor upon the signing of a treaty of

peace will the forces making for imperialism become extinct. In the

future, as in the past, a nationalistic competition for colonies will

carry with it the seeds of war.

[1] The _Saturday Review_, Volume LXXXIV, Sept. 11, 1897.

[2] Our exports to Canada in that year amounted to $410,786,000; those

of the United Kingdom, $132,071,000. Our imports from Canada were

$176,948,000; the imports of the United Kingdom, $222,322,000 (Canadian

figures). Statesman's Year Book, 1915, p. 285.

[3] Jamaican imports (1913-14). From the U. S., L1,326,723; from the

U. K., 1,088,309. Exports: to the U. S., L1,396,086; to the U. K.,

L424,491 (Jamaican figures). Statesman's Year Book, 1915, p. 327.

[4] Naturally our proportion of the trade would be still greater if

Canada and Jamaica were within the American customs union.

[5] Statesman's Year Book, 1915, p. 149.

[6] In 1913 the trade of the United Kingdom with British possessions

was still greater, though it formed in that year a smaller percentage

of the entire trade of the country. Statesman's Year Book, 1915, p.

77. The trade of the United Kingdom with foreign countries was

considerably less (in 1913) than was that of Germany.

[7] "Colonial Administration," pp. 210-11.

[8] _Op. cit._ "It has further been shown that in the foreign trade of

Great Britain the export of manufactured goods is declining while that

of raw material and machinery is increasing."

[9] "Germany's Colonial Policy," in "Modern Germany in Relation to the

Great War." New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1916, p. 152. See also

"British White Book," a report on Colonial Preferences given in various

countries. Oct. 21, 1909, No. 296. For an able analysis of the

results of the open and the closed door in colonies see Joehlinger

(Otto), "Die Koloniale Handelspolitik der Weltmachte,"

(_Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen_) Vol. XXXV, Berlin, 1914.

[10] Statesman's Year Book, 1915, pp. 893-94.

[11] Statesman's Year Book, 1915, p. 882.

[12] But the whole trade was small, amounting to less than 1 per cent.

of the entire foreign trade (in 1909) of Germany.

[13] In his defence of German Colonial policy, Dr. Solf makes much of

the fact that of the total sum of 500,000,000 marks invested in German

colonies, no less than 89,000,000 marks belongs to foreigners. But

this means that Germany which has little capital to export has invested

over 82 per cent. and all the other countries of the world less than 18

per cent. Moreover the character of the investment, not the absolute

amount, is significant. Competitive investment, as in a brewery or

cotton factory, does not bring the same profit as does a concession for

a railroad, tramway or bank.

[14] Paul Arndt. "Grundzuege der auswaertigen Politik Deutschlands,"

quoted by Ludwig Quessel, _Sozialistische Monatshefte_, Vol. 19, II,

June 12, 1913.

[15] Fr. Naumann. Die Hilfe, Nov. 16, 1911. Quoted by Ludwig Quessel.

"Auf dem Weg zum Weltreich." _Sozialistische Monatshefte_, Vol. 19,

1913.

[16] Ruedorffer, J. J., "Grundzuege der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart,"

Stuttgart und Berlin, 1914, quoted by Paul Rohrbach, "Germany's

Isolation" ("Der Krieg und die deutsche Politik"). Chicago, 1915.

{116}

CHAPTER IX

INDUSTRIAL INVASION

The direct competition between great industrial nations for the

products and profits of the backward countries would suffice to create

an international antagonism even if no other economic forces

contributed to this result. Closely though not obviously bound to this

struggle for colonies, however, is an equally intense struggle among

the industrial nations to force their way economically into each

other's home territory. Germany, it is alleged, forces her way

industrially into France, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. She

penetrates these countries economically, crushes their industries,

forces upon them her own industrial products, extracts from them the

profits which should go to their own manufacturers. Industrially,

commercially, financially she seeks to rule Italy and Belgium as Great

Britain rules the Argentine or Canada. She holds these countries, so

it is claimed, in industrial non-age. It is all a quiet economic

infiltration, a matter of buying and selling and of lawful contracts,

but it is none the less war. "War is war," admits Prof. Maurice

Milloud, a student of this phenomenon of German industrial expansion,

"but make no mistake that it is war."[1]

Within the last few years there have appeared numerous books by French,

Swiss, Belgian and Italian[2] {117} publicists attacking the policy by

which Germany prior to the war secured a partial control of her

neighbouring markets. With the merits of this controversy and with the

morality or immorality of the procedure, we need not concern ourselves.

To us the only point of interest is the nature of the economic forces

leading to such a conflict and the effect of this conflict in creating

national animosity and in inciting to war.

All the industrial nations export to one another as well as to the

agricultural countries. Why, then, is Germany's course so bitterly

resented?

At first glance one might suppose that the chief objection to this

German enterprise lay in its ruthlessness and economic terrorism. A

French manufacturer of formic acid is crushed outright by a sudden

price reduction; a Swiss or Italian manufacturer is ruined by being

spied upon by his own employes in the pay of a German competitor. But

the main objection to the German competition seems to be its

formidableness. Germany exports not only wares but men, and in all the

neighbouring countries are to be found German chemists, engineers,

business men and clerks. It is claimed that these pioneers hold

together, advance together, maintain the cult of _Deutschtum_ in an

alien country, and act as agents for the home industry. It is also

claimed that Germany "dumps" her goods on foreign markets, thus causing

losses or even total destruction to rival industries. Yet all these

things have been done before, and even the nations which object are not

always innocent of like practices. What is deeply resented, however,

is that the German competition is a disciplined state-aided

competition, that it is collective rather than individual. The

Belgian, Italian or Dutch {118} manufacturer feels that behind his

German competitor stand the gigantic power and resources of the whole

German nation. It is not individual Germans who compete, but Germany;

a patient, resourceful, long-sighted Germany, willing to make temporary

sacrifices for permanent gains, a Germany forced to expand industrially

and bending its immense wealth and power to this one purpose. Against

such an organised body what can a single manufacturer avail?

The means at Germany's disposal in this invasion of near-lying markets

are varied and great. Industry is organised; the German has a genius

for organisation. In all the near-lying countries, concerns with

German connections open up a wide channel for the incoming wares. In

Antwerp, in Rotterdam, in Zurich, a large part of the big business is

in German hands. German banks are established and these aid directly

or indirectly in the importation of German commodities. Moreover, the

Germans are better informed than any of their rivals concerning all the

minute knowledge necessary to the conquest of a local market. Their

business plans are not only far flung but meticulous; they have a

card-index method of study and their training is admirably adapted to

just these methods of commercial penetration.

No such penetration would be possible, however, but for the

intelligence with which German industry is conducted at home. In

Germany the scientifically trained man is more highly regarded than in

any other country. The chemist, the engineer, the specialist of every

sort is called into consultation and the laboratory is united to the

factory. The vast expense of maintaining a corps of inventors forever

working at new problems is more than compensated for by the frequent

technical improvements which result from their studies. The scientific

men employed by {119} the German chemical factories have revolutionised

methods and given Germany almost a monopoly in this rapidly growing

industry. In Germany also, as in America, there is a willingness to

discard old methods and machinery, whatever the initial expense. In a

few years the losses due to the change are retrieved and the German

business is creating values more efficiently than ever.

Such an industry must in its nature be immensely productive. The

Germans, like the Americans, are successful in mass production, the

fashioning of vast quantities of cheap, standardised articles.

Factories tend to grow larger. Formerly competing concerns are united

into associations or cartels, which buy or sell in common, save a vast

amount of unnecessary friction within the trade and act as a clearing

house for information and ideas. A high protective tariff enables

these cartels to maintain a remunerative price in the home market while

dumping their surplus products upon foreign markets.

What this "dumping" may mean for manufacturers in the countries upon

which the wares are dumped may be made clear by an example. "The

German ironmasters," writes Prof. Milloud, "sell their girders and

channel iron for 130 marks per ton in Germany, for 120 to 125 in

Switzerland; in England, South America and the East for 103 to 110

marks; in Italy they throw it away at 75 marks and _make a loss of from

10 to 20 marks per ton_, for the cost price may be reckoned at 85 to 95

marks per ton."[3] Other iron products have been sold by Germans in

Italy far cheaper than they could be sold or even produced in Germany,

with the result that the struggling Italian iron industry is hardly

able to exist. Nor is this dumping a mere temporary expedient to

relieve the German manufacturer of an unexpected surplus. It is {120}

systematic, organised and intentional, designed to destroy competitors

and establish a monopoly. It is a procedure with which we in America

are unpleasantly familiar, since it has been long the practice of our

trusts to destroy competition in a circumscribed local market by

temporarily reducing prices and then to raise prices after the

competitor is _hors de combat_.

The most striking difference between the flooding of adjacent markets

by German cartels and the destruction of competitors by American trusts

is that in the former case the operation is international, and the

manufacturers who suffer live in one country and those who profit in

another. Moreover, the German Government is itself directly concerned

in the process. Not only is the Government one of the associated

concerns in certain cartels, but by its railroad policy it gives an

immense impetus to dumping. Railroad rates are cheaper if the

commodity carried is to be exported. To take one out of a thousand

instances "the freight of a double wagon of German coal from Duisbourg

to Hamburg, a distance of 367 kilometers, costs 57 marks, whilst, in

the reverse direction, from the sea-board to the industrial centres in

the interior, the freight charge is 86 marks in the case of German

coal, and as high as 93 in the case of foreign coal."[4] The

Government grants an export bounty upon coal (and other commodities) in

the shape of reduced transportation rates.

We need not study in detail the vastness and complexity of that

integration of German industry, which permits it to act as a unit in

its invasion of near-lying territories. We need not recount the almost

vertiginous growth of the German banking system, with its tendency

towards a narrow concentration, its bold conduct and control of German

industry and its establishment of {121} branch organisations in the

countries to be invaded. Nor need we consider the practice of long

credits by which German manufacturers secure a foothold in new markets

or the system by which German capital, labour and intelligence migrate

to the foreign country, and as branches of a German concern, continue

the process of dumping from within. The significant fact is that the

entire process is organised and thought out. It is a concrete national

policy for securing German economic control in neighbouring industrial

countries.

Nothing could better illustrate the collective nature of this economic

invasion than the history of the German cartels. "It is evidently to

the cartels," writes Fritz-Diepenhorst, "that Germany owes in great

measure the conquest of foreign markets."[5]

The German cartel differs from the trust in that it does not represent

the absorption of weaker rivals by one powerful concern but is a

federation of business units which retain their legal independence but

surrender a part of their industrial and commercial autonomy. In the

beginning the German cartels represented an effort to regulate prices

in the home market, but after the adoption of a protective tariff and

during the period when Germany launched out upon a policy of

large-scale exportation, the cartels grew in numbers and power. Their

policy was to maintain prices at home and sell at a lower rate abroad.

But this policy, owing to a near-sighted individualism, injured the

German export industry itself. The coal cartel determined its policy

irrespective of the interests of the coke cartel, which in turn fixed

its prices irrespective of the interests of the iron industry. As a

result vast {122} quantities of raw materials and semi-manufactured

products were shipped abroad at prices which permitted the foreign

manufacturer of finished wares to undersell the German manufacturer.

It was a boomerang dumping, which worked to the advantage of the dumped

and to the disadvantage of the dumper.

Within the last fifteen years, however, and especially since the report

in 1903 of the German Parliamentary Commission on Cartels, this early

anarchy has been gradually abolished, and arrangements have been made

by which a cartel grants lower prices not only for its own exports but

also for such part of its home-sold product as is to be used in the

manufacture of more highly finished wares, which are in turn to be

exported. The coal used in iron manufactures that are to be shipped to

foreign countries is sold cheaper than the coal used in iron

manufactures which are not to be exported. A community of interest

among the cartels is thus created. The result is an amazing industrial

solidarity. "The individual exporter disappeared in the cartel, and

the cartel itself is absorbed in this sort of cartel of cartels, which

ends by becoming the German industry.... For an economic guerilla

warfare there is substituted a mass action, a veritable strategy."[6]

The excesses of dumping are cured and dumping becomes a national

economic policy.

But how can this organised conquest of adjacent industrial countries be

averted without some alternative method for the economic expansion of a

highly organised industry? The same forces that push Germany and

England into an imperialistic policy and into a conquest of the markets

of agricultural countries also force them into a competition to secure

the markets of industrial countries. The two processes are not quite

alike, since the trade between, {123} let us say, Brazil and Germany is

a complementary and mutually beneficial commerce, while the dumping of

German rails and girders on Italy is a competition or war between two

industrial nations. The impulse and motive in both cases is, however,

the same. It is the desire to increase buying power. Germany can

secure more of the wool of Australia and of the wheat of the Argentine

if she can establish even a limited economic dominion over adjoining

countries. It is the lack of a sufficient home market that forces

Germany to dump her goods on Switzerland and Belgium just as it forces

England to sell largely to her colonies and to invest in backward

countries.

How far this policy of industrial invasion can safely go is one of the

interesting international problems of the future. It is of course not

the desire of any country to sell permanently below cost to the

foreigner, since such a policy means, if not actual loss, at least a

diminution of profits.[7] Germany would prefer to get the same price

for her girders in England and Italy as she does at home. But she must

take what she can get. Her industry is based upon a productiveness in

excess of the demands of the home market, and she is under the

necessity of paying for large importations of food and raw material and

of profitably employing increasing numbers of workmen. Her industrial

invasion of neighbouring countries is alternative and supplementary to

an attempt to secure a {124} needed colonial market. It is,

parenthetically, a necessity imposed upon an industrial nation menaced

by a constantly growing population.

Be this policy of invasion ever so well organised, however, it cannot

escape inherent limitations and obstacles. The German export policy

maintained itself only by holding up prices at home, which meant an

increased cost of living and a rise in money wages. The imposition of

tariffs by neighbouring countries meant an increase in the difficulties

to be overcome in exportation and a reduction in the net profits of the

foreign trade. To a considerable extent this export of cheapened goods

was at the mercy of the importing nations, which, at any moment, might

levy prohibitory duties. At the best the whole development led to

strong opposition and prejudice, to counter-attacks, to the violation

of favouring commercial treaties and to the imposition of punitive

duties (as in the Canadian tariff) especially aimed at dumpings. In

the opinion of many observers, the policy provided an insecure base for

a top-heavy industry, with the result that in Germany industrial crises

were frequent and destructive and the economic development showed the

weaknesses of a forced growth.

It is too early to pass judgment upon the relative success or failure

of this industrial invasion. Prof. Milloud believes that the policy by

1914 had demonstrated its failure, and that the fear of an industrial

_debacle_ forced Germany to escape from an impossible economic position

by throwing Europe into war. How far this is true it is difficult to

determine.[8] It is evident, however, that the {125} difficulty of

this German penetration of adjacent countries must have intensified a

desire for an easier market in the colonies. The Italian trade for

which Germany fought so hard must have seemed unremunerative and

unpromising as compared with the practically monopolised market which

France possessed in North Africa or with that which Germany could

obtain through the Bagdad Railway and the penetration of Asia Minor.

The sharpness of the conflict for nearer lying markets illustrated anew

the necessity of securing colonial outlets.

If, however, the competition among industrial countries to secure each

other's markets results in national antagonism, the competition of the

same nations for the exclusive possession of colonies and dependencies

leads, as we have seen, to an equally bitter struggle. The choice

seems to lie between the devil and the deep sea. It is no wonder

therefore that as the rapid expansion of industry brings the great

nations into ever keener antagonism, voices are raised against the

whole imperialistic policy. Just as the German consumer objects to

paying high prices for German commodities which the Belgian or Italian

can buy cheap, so also opposition is encountered to a policy of

extending colonial development at the expense and imminent risk of the

nation and to the obvious benefit of certain preferred classes in the

community.

[1] "The Ruling Caste and Frenzied Finance in Germany." Boston, 1916,

p. 104.

[2] See in the first instance Milloud, _op. cit._, and Prof. Henri

Hauser, "Les Methodes Allemandes d'expansion Economique," Paris, 1916.

also G. Preziosi, "La Germania alia conquista dell' Italia," Florence,

1915.

[3] _Op. cit._, pp. 104-5. His italics.

[4] Milloud, _op. cit._, p. 110.

[5] _Revue economique Internationale_, 1914, II, p. 259, quoted from

Hauser (H.) "Les methodes allemandes d'expansion economique," p. 106.

[6] Hauser, H., _op. cit._, p. 128.

[7] The goods exported to foreign countries may show a profit if they

are sold at a price less than the average cost of production but

greater than the marginal cost. If it costs $100 a unit to produce a

million units of a given product for the home market and only $70 a

unit to produce an additional 100,000 units then there is a profit in

permanently selling this extra amount at any price above $70. To break

down a foreign competition it may pay _temporarily_ to sell at 60 or

even 30 dollars, in order to raise prices again after competition is

destroyed.

[8] Prof. Milloud's argument based upon the relative growth of British

and German exports is far from conclusive. He shows that in the period

from 1890-1903 to 1904-08 the German export trade increased only 75 per

cent while the British export trade increased 79 per cent. If we

consider the statistics for the subsequent period, 1909 to 1913 (which

figures were quite accessible to Prof. Milloud), we find that the

German export industry increased much more rapidly than did that of

Britain.

{126}

CHAPTER X

THE REVOLT AGAINST IMPERIALISM

What determines whether a backward country is to be exploited by its

own people or by some beneficent imperialistic power is not any

consideration of its own welfare, but the chance of profits held out to

certain adventurous financiers in the capitals of Europe. These modern

pioneers are a ruthless, dangerous group, with the bold, speculative

imagination that has marked adventurers since the world began. They

have a domestic and a foreign morality, an ethics for home consumption

and a fine contempt for "greasers" and "niggers." They know the

difference between five per cent. and twenty per cent., and their

business consists in investing their money at high rates of profit

(because the enterprise is hazardous) and then in taking out the hazard

by making their home government compel the fulfilment of their

impossible contracts.

The methods of these men are monotonously similar. They lend, they

invest, they support revolutions, they invoke "the protection of the

flag." They need not pay attention to the public opinion of the

backward countries; they do not believe such countries have a public

opinion. All that these speculators need is the support of their home

government, and that they may secure through bribery, newspaper

influence and patriotism. The first two cost money and are worth all

they cost; the third can be had for {127} nothing. As for the excuse

for intervention, it is that used by the wolf when he took a fancy to

the lamb. Money is loaned at usurious rates to some rogue who poses in

history as the President of the lamb republic or to some spendthrift

imbecile of a Khedive. Concessions are secured. By a concession in

this instance is meant a solemn contract, by which, for and in

consideration of nothing, duly paid in hand, the whole nation, its

territory and population, are turned over in perpetuity. The

negotiations are ratified by a battle cruiser; a few marines are

landed, a few barelegged natives are buried in a tropical back-yard, a

treaty of peace and amity is concluded between the Imperial Power and

its latest morsel, and the real business of imperialism begins. It is

good business and pays big dividends.

But to whom do the dividends go? What profit has the French artisan or

peasant in all these grand concessions from the illustrious Sultan of

Morocco? How does the English workman prosper when English capital

employs cheap Indian labour to undersell British factories? Obviously

the immediate profits accrue to large capitalists rather than to the

mass of the people. If a French peasant can invest his savings in

Morocco, he may earn a few extra dollars per year on his holdings of a

thousand francs, but his whole interest payment forms a small

proportion of his annual income. To the financier, on the other hand,

who directs the investment of hundreds of millions, a concession in

Morocco is of value.

The case of French foreign investments is pertinent. As a result of

the activity of great bankers, who rule both finance and politics, some

forty billion francs have been invested in foreign countries. The

individual investor has little choice and no intelligent direction in

these large affairs. It is even possible that the whole course of

French {128} investments has been disadvantageous; that too much French

capital has been sent abroad to cultivate foreign fields (or pay for

war preparations) and too little has been absorbed at home. The profit

to bankers does not prove that the loans are equally profitable to the

nation. In any definite imperialistic policy, as that in Morocco, this

difference in interest between the directors and small owners of

capital becomes even clearer. The promoters can afford even to risk

war, while for the small investor, who, after all, can invest

elsewhere, the net gain is less apparent, especially as the war, if it

comes, must be fought by him and be paid for by him.

From the beginning, therefore, a revolt or opposition has been

manifested (in certain sections of the industrial nations) to the whole

principle and policy of imperialism. This revolt relies for support

upon those elements in the population who believe either that they are

not benefited by imperialism or only slightly benefited. Liberal and

socialistic sentiment forms the core and centre of this opposition.

For the most part the socialists are theoretically opposed to

imperialism on the ground that it is immoral, brutal, anti-democratic

and uneconomic. It does not, they believe, pay the people who in the

end pay for it.

This anti-imperialistic philosophy of the Socialists is chiefly derived

from the anti-colonial attitude of the liberals of the early nineteenth

century. That attitude was founded on opposition to special trade

privileges, which was the basis of the old colonial policy, and also on

the belief that colonies did not benefit the mother country. In the

middle of the eighteenth century Turgot had declared that "colonies are

like fruits which cling to the tree only till they ripen," and he

predicted that "as soon as America can take care of herself, she will

do what Carthage did." When the American colonies later fulfilled this

prediction {129} by securing their independence, and when it was

perceived that this separation did not lessen England's commerce with

America, the opponents of colonialism, who were also advocates of free

trade, were reinforced in their convictions. The only true extension

was trade, and to secure trade political domination was unnecessary.

It was by no means contended even by the most doctrinaire free trader

that an increase in the population and wealth of new countries, such as

the United States and Canada, was undesirable. All they opposed was

political dominion by the home country and the adoption of a

restrictive trade policy. Similarly the orthodox Socialists of to-day

make a sharp distinction between colonisation and imperialism, between

the acquisition, by conquest or otherwise, of lands suitable for

settlement and the seizure of populous countries to which emigration is

impossible. In this distinction it is not the intention but the fact

that counts; whatever the motives of the explorers, the new country

becomes a colony if it furnishes homes. Such colonising is a direct

national gain, benefiting all classes. The redemptioner, who was

carried off to the British settlements in America, did in the end

improve his economic condition, and his descendants, like those of the

free immigrants, now form the population of the country. On the other

hand tropical dominions, like Porto Rico or Egypt, can provide profits

for investors but no homes for settlers.

This distinction negates by definition the claim that imperialism is an

outlet for a redundant population. Of the emigrants from the United

Kingdom during the last thirty years only a microscopic percentage went

to Britain's tropical colonies. In British India in 1911 only one in

every two thousand was British born. Similarly, most French, German,

Belgian and Dutch colonies furnish no {130} outlet to the surplus

populations of these nations. Even in Algeria the Europeans constitute

only one-seventh of the population, and in Tunis only about one-tenth.

The entire European population in all German, French and British

possessions (exclusive of the five self-governing colonies), is less

than the net immigration to the United States every two or three

years.[1]

The opponents of imperialism moreover claim that all the regions fit

for colonisation are already pre-empted. There is room for many

millions in the five self-governing colonies of Great Britain, as there

is in Siberia and South America, but where can place be found in

regions newly acquired by imperialism? Where can homes be had to-day

for some twenty million Germans (the excess of German population in a

single generation), to say nothing of tens of millions of Italians,

British, Austrians and Poles? It is frequently claimed that the new

medical science, which conquers tropical diseases, will make these

regions habitable by the whites. But though the sanitary improvement

in the Canal Zone permitted thousands of Americans to help build the

canal, it did not result in the actual physical work of construction

being performed by white men. Despite sanitary improvements, the

Jamaica negro could endure a hard day's work under the tropical sun far

better than a man from Illinois. The economic advantage of the

lower-priced coloured labour is still more decisive. While in the

highly organised industries of England, Germany or the United States,

high wages frequently mean small labour cost, in the lower-geared

industries of the tropics the coloured man, black or yellow, easily

holds his {131} own. Since the European excess of births over deaths

is about forty millions per decade, the impossibility of finding a

place for this excess population in tropical and subtropical countries

is manifest.

If the countries still to be overrun are not adapted for colonisation,

the benefits accruing from imperialism, according to these

anti-imperialists, will go to merchants, manufacturers and investors

and not to wage-earners. It is often claimed that this trade which

arises from an imperialistic policy is not great enough to exercise a

beneficent influence upon the fortunes of the masses. Prof. Hobson,

writing in 1902, states that during the period since 1870, when Great

Britain launched into its latest imperialistic policy, British foreign

commerce did not grow as rapidly as population, and actually declined

in proportion to wealth. The British colonies increased their trade

with other nations more rapidly than with the home country. The newly

acquired colonies, the last fruits of imperialism, were the least

profitable. Their commerce was small, fluctuating and of low quality.

Mr. Hobson therefore comes to the conclusion "that our modern

imperialistic policy has had no appreciable influence whatever upon the

determination of our external trade."[2]

When we consider individual countries which have been the cause of much

rivalry and dissension, we discover that their commerce is often

extremely small. France has almost monopolised the trade of

Martinique, but in 1913 her total trade with that country was less than

a sixtieth of her trade with the United Kingdom and less than a

fiftieth {132} of her trade with Germany. The specifically tropical

countries, for which the nations are fighting, do not have a commerce

worth a fraction of the cost of their acquisition.[3] Nor are the

investments in the imperialistic domain nearly so large as those in

countries over which the European nations exercise no political

control. France has invested largely in Russia and the Balkans;

Germany has put capital into the United States, South America and Asia

Minor; England has gigantic sums in countries over which she exercises

no dominion. The profits from imperialistic investments are merely a

bonus. Though they loom large in the popular imagination, they are

only a small part of the national income, and even at the best these

profits go to capitalists and not to the people.

Moreover, what advantage is it to the wage-earner to have his country's

wealth exported beyond his reach? Concerning this movement towards

absentee ownership of capital, the widest divergence of opinion

prevails. The optimists among the investing classes find it all good

and sanctified by its results. The exportation of capital, they hold,

not only fructifies the waste places of the world but does not decrease

the capital in the exporting country, since it raises the rate of

interest and thus stimulates saving. But such a rise in the interest

rate means an increase in the cost of living and a reduction in the

real wages of labour. In so far as it goes into competitive industrial

enterprises abroad, it lessens the opportunity of labour at home. Thus

if British capital, exported to India, is used to erect cotton mills in

Calcutta, India will import fewer cotton goods from England, and

British capital will be employing {133} Indian labour and throwing

British labour out of employment. This situation is analogous to that

which was created when Northern textile manufacturers, instead of

increasing their New England plants, built mills in Georgia, thus

transferring the demand for employment from the North to the South.

It is further contended by these opponents of imperialism that the

export of capital is profoundly demoralising to the exporting nation,

which ceases, in a real sense, to be industrial, and becomes financial.

Gradually the nation, with a large fixed income derived from foreign

labour, ceases to care for its export industry, loses its intensity and

keen application to business, becomes conservative in the technique of

production, and, being no longer interested in the development of home

industries (since its gains come from abroad), converts hundreds of

thousands of industrial wage-earners into liveried house-servants, who

minister to the cultivated wants of a sport-loving and decoratively

idle upper class.

The effect of this development upon England, the classic land of

capital export, is portrayed in an acute study by Dr.

Schulze-Gaevernitz.[4] The author shows how the steadily mounting

income derived by Great Britain from foreign investments has led to a

relative restriction of the field of employment in home manufacturing

industries. In 1851 23 per cent. of the population of England and

Wales were workers in the chief industries as compared with only 15 per

cent. a half century later.[5] Imports increase; exports do not

increase proportionately. An ever larger proportion of the population

becomes rentiers, {134} "living on the sweat of coloured labour, whom

it is their first interest to hold in political subjection." Some of

these rentiers, large and small, are wholly unoccupied or only half

occupied. They are sleeping partners, briefless barristers, professors

of professions which do not exist. To these income-receivers or

rentiers, whom Schulze-Gaevernitz estimates at a million, must be added

enormous numbers of servants and lackeys, who are paid, though

indirectly, from the Kimberley mines and investments in the Argentine.

Upon the industry of the backward countries these idle and semi-idle

people make increasing demands, and industry becomes a production of

luxuries. In the meantime the nation falls behind in its competition

with more purely industrial countries like Germany and the United

States. In the machine industry, in ship-building, in applied

chemistry England does not hold her own.[6] Her technique of

production, her methods in commerce and banking become old-fashioned

and ineffective; her invention (as measured by the issuance of patents)

does not keep pace with that of her chief competitors. And all this

conservatism does not inhere in the British character (for formerly the

Briton revolutionised the world) but is attributable to the fact that

Great Britain is pre-eminently a _Rentnerstaat_, a country of

pensioners and creditors, increasingly independent and careless of its

foreign export, and of the industries which formerly kept that export

going.[7]

{135}

There is some exaggeration but also much truth in this description of a

_Rentnerstaat_. Psychologically the account fits the Englishman less

exactly than the Frenchman, who is industrially less venturesome.

Moreover from the individual's view-point it makes little difference

whether his fixed income is derived from abroad or at home.

Economically, however, the influence of a large class of individuals

living by foreign industry is difficult to exaggerate. Their interests

are abroad; at home they are concerned chiefly with the maintenance of

low prices. The nation becomes in a sense parasitic, living without

effort upon the "lesser breeds" in all parts of the world.

Whatever its evil results, however, there is little reason to believe

that any nation will willingly surrender the income on its foreign

investments or cease to export new capital if conditions are

favourable. The interest-receiving nations are the world's

aristocrats, happy in their favoured position, and if they can thus

live partly on their past labour they see no reason for receiving less

or working more. The social evils resulting at home from such a

condition can be cured by changes in taxation and the distribution of

wealth, by legislation which gives a greater part of the income from

foreign investments to the nation as a whole, and thus forces the

rentiers back into industrial life. So long, however, as foreign

investment is essential to the widening of the agricultural base of

industrial nations, it will not be stopped by its beneficiaries.[8]

Those who advocate a complete cessation of the export {136} of

capital,[9] therefore, might as well argue against its accumulation.

You could not stop it if you wished, and would be none the wiser for

wishing it. The export of capital is merely an export of goods, paid

for in credit instead of in goods, and the only way to prevent credit

from coming into the country is the suicidal method of expelling the

creditor. It is unlikely, therefore, that this movement will cease

until the demand for capital is fairly equalised throughout the world,

until the backward nations of to-day are sated with capital or have

themselves become industrial countries.

The danger lies in exactly the opposite direction, not in an abstention

by wealthy nations from investing abroad, but in so keen, unscrupulous

and rough-handed a competition for the right to invest as to result in

war.

This danger of war is the final argument of anti-imperialists. They

argue that the sacrifices which result in increased profits to

investors and merchants are made by the masses who profit least from

such investment. Not only do the people pay for the armaments to

secure political domination, but also for the wars, which in these days

of clashing imperialistic ambitions are an ever-present possibility.

So long as the imperialistic scramble continues war will be inevitable.

For no new dominion can be secured without threatening the interests or

pretensions of rival imperial nations. The vastly extended empires are

cheek by jowl. An extension of one power anywhere menaces the colonies

of another nation; rival colonial ambitions merge with strategical

questions. Just as the United States will not endure Japan on the West

Coast of Mexico, nor England Germany on the West Coast of Morocco or on

the Persian Gulf, so each nation fears the approach of other nations to

its most distant {137} possessions. Immediately even visions arise of

coaling stations, from which great fleets may later issue, to be

followed by transports of disciplined troops. In the seventeenth

century England, France, Spain and Holland could hold colonies in North

America and be reasonably out of each other's way. In the twentieth

century, this is no longer possible.

The increased cost of war adds to the opposition of these democratic

groups. No longer is war a mere isolated venture of a single nation,

but a conflict between alliances on a scale utterly unthought-of in

former generations. No conceivable gain derived from any colonial

venture of the last fifty years could compensate for the mere economic

losses involved in the present war, to say nothing of the loss of life,

the maiming and crippling of young men and the disruption of

international bonds. And if war costs much so also does the

preparation for war. Until some mutual accommodation can be secured,

even the most pacific nation must bear the burden of increasing

armaments.

There is a still deeper antagonism to these imperialistic ventures.

From the beginning, the dominant classes in societies which are

developing towards democracy have used foreign adventure to allay

domestic discontent and to oppose democratic progress. When war is

begun or even threatened it is too late to speak of uninteresting and

seemingly petty internal reforms. Between industrial and political

democracy on the one hand and a policy of foreign adventures on the

other, there is an inevitable opposition.

It is not that the political and industrial interests of the dominant

classes favour war, but rather a policy involving the constant fear of

war. This fear itself is worth millions. It means a huge vested

interest in the creation {138} of munitions and armaments. It means

political quiescence and domination by a financial-military group. But

for the fear of war and the imperialistic policies which kept this fear

alive, the militaristic _Junker_ class of Germany could not have

maintained its domination.[10] To disband the German army would cost

these landed proprietors more than would a Russian invasion. And a

similar if lesser conflict in class interest is found in France,

England, Austria and to a certain extent in the United States. In all

countries, the imperialistic policy, even when it redounds ultimately

to the nation's advantage, is a class policy used to further class

purposes.

In Europe, however, it is difficult for democratic leaders to make

headway against imperialism. For the tragedy of the situation lies in

the fact that where nations are constantly on the watch against each

other, the imperialistic motive is interwoven with other motives of

self-defence and nearer territorial aggression. If Germany is intent

upon war, and if her road leads over France, then France must arm. To

be effective in defence, she must have {139} universal service,

professional officers, a true military spirit, a certain degree of

autocracy in military arrangements, as well as offensive and defensive

alliances, not based on a true community of interest or similarity of

ideals, but upon the need of beating back the foe. If England fears

German aggression she cannot afford to maintain an isolation however

magnificent, but is obliged to enter into alliances, _ententes_ and

secret engagements. For if you play the game you must play it

according to the rules. Moreover, if you have the armament and

alliances necessary for defence, you are tempted to use them for an

aggressive and imperialistic policy. Indeed, such an imperialistic

policy may actually form the cement of your alliances.

All these considerations lame and thwart the movement against

imperialism. Moreover, the problem of governing the backward countries

remains. For their own sake you cannot leave them alone, and the

abstention of one nation merely makes the imperialistic ventures of

other nations easier. If governments refrain from organising backward

countries, the private capitalistic exploitation of these regions will

be more ruthless than ever. The anti-imperialists are thus faced with

a difficult situation which they cannot meet with _a priori_ argument

and pious formula. With them or without them, some form of

co-operation must be effected between industrial and agricultural

nations as well as some form of control over countries incapable of

self-government. There is need for a definite, concrete democratic

policy for the government of such backward countries.

[1] In the Philippines in 1914, out of a total population of almost

nine millions (8,937,597), less than 20,000 were Europeans and

Americans, including troops. The density of the native population is

greater than that of Indiana and over three times that of the United

States as a whole.

[2] "Imperialism," p. 35. A survey of more recent figures somewhat

modifies these conclusions of Mr. Hobson. The statistics of 1913 prove

that British commerce with British colonies has not only greatly

increased but has increased faster than British commerce with foreign

countries. Trade with Canada, Australia, India, Egypt, New Zealand and

the Straits has grown steadily and rapidly.

[3] This argument, however, is not entirely conclusive, since it

concerns itself with the _present_ trade exclusively. The profits in

1755 on the trade with Canada would not have justified Great Britain in

seeking to acquire it.

[4] "Britischer Imperialisms und Freihandel."

[5] In the chief industries there were 4,074,000 out of a population of

17,928,000 in 1851 and 4,966,000 out of a population of 32,526,000 in

1901.

[6] No such criticism can apply to the relative British decline of such

crude industries as the production of coal and raw iron, since it is

natural and desirable for more highly developed industrial nations to

go over increasingly from the cruder to the more refined and

differentiated forms of production.

[7] "As we look back, we survey the long road which England has

traversed in a century. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the

leading man was the landlord and behind him the _breitspurig_

comfortable farmer; towards the middle of the nineteenth century it was

the manufacturer and behind him the industrial workers, ripening into

trade unionists and members of co-operative societies; to-day it is the

financier and behind him the broad masses of the _rentiers_." _Op.

cit._, p. 322.

[8] There may, however, be regulation, although this is, for any one

nation, a difficult operation.

[9] See Burgess' "Homeland."

[10] In his celebrated book, "The Nation in Arms," the late

Field-Marshall von der Goltz shows how necessary is the sense of the

imminence of war to the maintenance of the prestige of the officer

class, which, as he states, is "chosen from the German aristocracy."

He quotes approvingly the words of Decken: "Now, when in consequence of

a long peace the memories of past services have become completely

obliterated, and there is no immediate prospect of a war, the citizens

take more and more note of the burden of the upkeep of an army, and

attempt to convince themselves of the uselessness of this institution."

To which Von der Goltz adds: "The present day (1883), especially in

Germany is favourable in this respect to the officer class. Great and

successful wars have enhanced its renown, and have moderated the envy

of others. But should peace endure for several decades to come, it may

again become necessary to remind the people that external favours may,

without harm, be extended to the military profession, and especially to

the officers."--Popular edition, London, 1914, p. 25.

{140}

CHAPTER XI

THE APPEAL OF IMPERIALISM

It is a significant fact that despite a democratic opposition to

imperialism it is precisely the democratic nations, England and France,

which are most imperialistic. The British public seems always willing

to make sacrifices to extend the Empire, and an almost equal enthusiasm

is found among great sections of the French democracy. Also in

Germany, when an election was fought in 1907 upon a colonial issue,

thousands who usually voted the Socialist ticket gave their adhesion to

the imperialists.

Such a popular adhesion is essential to the success of an imperialistic

policy. The masses need not be consulted upon the first steps but they

are urgently called into conference when trouble begins and

"pacification" or war is necessary. Your financier, with all his

money, is helpless against the rival ambitions of a great nation, and,

he must have the support of his own country, its navy, army, credit,

and millions of patriotic citizens. How is he to secure this support?

To understand the implications of this question we must consider the

changes in modern warfare and the rise of democracy in the Western

World. The mercenary soldiers once employed by absolutist princes

would go anywhere at any time and no questions asked. War was a game

played by small teams of professionals. To-day it is a national

conflict in which entire populations, old and young, male and female,

are pitted against each other. This fact gives {141} to the peoples a

passive quasi-veto upon war, for success in a crucial conflict depends

upon enthusiasm and supreme unity. To-day Germany would crumple if her

people were actively hostile or even merely listless towards the war.

It would be difficult to raise loans, to sequester goods, to ensure the

continuance of the industries upon which the nation and army live.

Victory depends upon the morale of the entire population. During the

war itself, it is true, a nation tends to lose its power of

self-criticism and to fight blindly. It defends proposals that in

peace would be indefencible; it works itself up to a pitch of righteous

self-justification. But war to-day is won before the first shot is

fired; it is won by preparation. An army must be raised, a reserve of

officers created, munitions stocked, strategic railways built, and

plans elaborated for rapid military mobilisation and for a war

organisation of industry. All this costs money--hundreds of millions.

If then the nation is to be taxed for military budgets, and if the

people as a whole secure an increasing veto over such expenditures,

would it not seem likely that the nations would look askance at

dangerous imperialistic ventures which contributed so obviously to the

danger of war and to the size of military expenditures. Would not the

people say to the financiers, "Keep your capital at home. Make your

profits at home"?

To avert an attitude so fatal to any national policy of imperialism

likely to lead to war, enthusiasm must be aroused and support secured.

This support may be sought by a two-fold appeal; to direct economic

interest, and to the sentiment of patriotism. The two appeals are not

sharply separated, but merge.

The economic argument for imperialism is that its advantages are in the

end widely distributed. Better access to raw material and a wider

market for manufactures {142} means a flourishing national industry,

steadier employment, better wages, and a prosperity of the whole

population. A similar argument is made for investment in colonies.

The whole nation is benefited if its capital brings the largest

returns, and these are to be obtained only abroad and by an imperialist

policy.

This diversion of profits, works itself out in various ways. By

swelling the income of the wealthy classes, foreign investment

increases the expenditure at home for the labour of nationals, thus

leading to steadier employment and higher wages. The servants of

England are supported by India, Egypt and the Rand Mines, as also by

the profits on New York real estate and American rails.[1] The

distribution of such income, moreover, is a matter over which the

British nation has the final say. The entire national dividend,

whencesoever derived, is a fund out of which all social improvements

may be paid. Social insurance, popular education, and other government

projects for the national welfare are supported, and may be

increasingly supported, by a taxation which in the form of income and

inheritance taxes falls heavily on the rich. Such a policy, by

creating a certain community of interest between classes, gives to the

entire population an economic interest in the wealth of the few. The

profits from foreign, as from domestic investments, may be drawn upon

at will for national purposes.

The importance of this development in its effect upon nationalism and

imperialism has been largely overlooked. {143} We have heard much of

the German doctrine of the State as Power, but have failed to realise

how Germany, like certain other European nations, has used its powers

of taxation and governmental expenditure to create for the masses an

ever larger stake in the national income. A policy, which increasingly

taxes the rich for the benefit of the poor, establishes a certain unity

in the commonwealth. Even the Socialist parties alter their

allegiance. The early Socialists were aggressively anti-patriotic,

opposing to all conceptions of nationalism the solidarity of the

working classes of the world. Karl Marx for example, declared that the

workingman had no fatherland, "for in none is he a son." He was a

nomad of society, doomed to a life hardly more secure, though far more

burdensome, than that of the tramp or gipsy. Long before the war,

however, many Socialists had accepted a more nationalistic view. Not

only did wage-earners realise that they already participated to some

extent in the social surplus, but they also saw that their increasing

political power would enable them to influence the future distribution

of the national income, however that income were obtained.[2] Once

this interest in the national dividend was assured, it became

desirable, even to Socialists, to make that dividend as large as

possible. The belief spread that all groups within a nation have

common interests opposed to the interest of other nations. Thus the

Austrian Socialist Dr. Otto Bauer in his "Imperialisms und die

Nationalitaetsfrage" denies that the immediate interests of the

wage-earners are the same in all countries and asserts that the workers

may {144} find good reason to side with the employers of their own

nation against wage-earners and employers in another country. "We do

not say that there are no conflicts of interests between the nations,

but we say, on the contrary, that as long as exploitation and

oppression continue, there will be conflicts of interests between

nations."[3] From which follows the conclusion that until capitalism

is destroyed, and that may take many decades, it is essential for the

workman to develop the welfare of the wage-earners of his own country,

rather than of the world in general.[4]

This argument is to immediate interest, which, as a rule, overrides

considerations of ultimate interest. To the German workman, for

example, it seems plain that English proletarians will not gain _his_

salvation; he must gain it himself. The German wage-earner must be

better fed, clothed, housed, educated, organised, and all these needs

translate themselves into more regular work, better paid. But if

German industry is defeated by English industry, the German workman

will suffer unemployment, reduction of wages, lockouts, unsuccessful

strikes, and a decline in trade union membership. Such a retrogression

means a {145} delaying of the ultimate working class victory as well as

a worse situation in the present. And, parenthetically, workingmen and

Socialists, being ordinary men with the ambitions and appetites of

ordinary men, do not spend seven evenings in the week in contemplation

of a Co-operative Commonwealth any more than the average church-goer

devotes his entire mind to the Day of Judgment. The German Socialist

has his bowling club and his _Stammtisch_; he must buy shoes for the

children and a new pipe for himself, and his weekly wages count more

than his share in a new society, which will not come until he is dead.

Besides his wages, he is interested in his government insurance

premiums, in the education of his children, in the things that he and

his family and the families of his class wish to enjoy. If imperialism

appears to raise wages as well as profits, he is not likely to oppose

it on sentimental grounds, especially as there are theorists who stand

ready to prove that Imperialism is merely the last phase of Capitalism

and will bring Socialism all the sooner.

And the argument for the beneficial reaction of imperialism upon wages

seems at first glance convincing. The German workman sees that wages

are high in England. He is told that the cause is the early British

conquest of foreign markets.[5] His own rapid progress during recent

{146} years he associates with a simultaneous increase in German

industry and foreign trade. If therefore the foreign field is to be

extended, why is the German eternally to be left out in the division?

Such a workman does not like the methods used, but so long as markets

are to be seized, whether Germany takes part or not, he is, with mental

reservations, in favour of a "firm" policy.[6] He wants not war, but

foreign markets. Let Germany become rich by means of imperialism and

the wage-earner in due time will be able to get his share.

If such an appeal can be made to the socialist, it can be made with

even greater success to the middle classes, who have no

anti-nationalistic prejudice and whose attitude is easily influenced by

that of the great capitalists. The influence of the imperialistic

propaganda was shown in a searching analysis of German public opinion

made in 1912 or 1913 by a Frenchman and reproduced in the French Yellow

Book. The colonial expansion of France was regarded with intense

irritation. "Germans" it was held, "still require outlets for their

commerce, and they still desire economic and colonial expansion. This

they consider as their right as they are growing every day, and the

future belongs to them." The treaty of 1911 with France (concerning

Morocco) is considered to be a defeat for Germany, and France is

represented as bellicose. On these two points, all groups are

unanimous, "deputies of all parties in the Reichstag, from

Conservatives to Socialists, University men of Berlin, Halle, Jena and

Marburg, students, teachers, employes, bank clerks, bankers, artisans,

traders, manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, the editors of democratic and

socialist newspapers, Jewish publicists, {147} members of the trade

unions, pastors and shop-keepers of Brandenburg, _Junkers_ from

Pomerania and shoe-makers of Stettin, the owners of castles, government

officials, cures and the large farmers of Westphalia."[7] "The

resentment felt in every part of the country is the same. All Germans,

even the Socialists, resent our having taken their share in Morocco."

The German diplomatic defeat is a "national humiliation."[8]

The words "national humiliation" used by this French observer

illuminates both the force and limits of the economic motive in

throwing nations into imperialism. The desire for greater profits and

higher wages present themselves not nakedly, but garbed with idealistic

motives. "A decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as well as a

desire to gain one's own self-respect, compels men to represent their

more crassly egoistic desires as part of an ethical plan. It is not

hypocrisy, but a transformation of material into ideal values.

Thus nationalism enters into the problem, and the appeal to the

supposed interests of the masses becomes an appeal to their

"patriotism." The nation is outraged, humiliated, despised. Its

honour, which is in reality its prestige and inflated self-esteem, is

affected. Though not quite identical with the economic interests of

the citizens, national honour has much to do with the conservation and

furtherance of those interests. It is a mirror cracked and smudged

with ancient dirt, which reflects imperfectly the economic motives of

the classes dominant in the nation.

The more primitive and instinctive a man, the more he is actuated by

these idealistic elements. The crowds on {148} the London streets on

Mafeking Day did not know what they wanted with the Rand mines, but

they were true-blue Britishers, a trifle drunk but all the more

patriotic. It is to this feeling of patriotism, sober or half-sober,

to which the men who have something to gain from imperialism appeal.

The home nation has its sacred duty to perform to the backward country,

which does not pay its debts and is rent by revolutions, fomented

perhaps abroad. The home nation must not relinquish its arduous

privilege. It must not haul down the flag. It must not defer to other

nations. Beyond the seas there is to be created a New England, a New

France, a New Germany, to which all the national virtues are to be

transplanted. The emigrants now lost to alien lands will carry their

flag with them, and the nation will no longer strew its seed upon the

sand. This nation (whichever one it happens to be) has a divine

mission, which it can never perform unless it has a suitable army and

navy, and unless this day week it sends a battleship to a certain port

in China or Africa.

This quasi-idealistic element in imperialism strongly reinforces the

economic argument. The German, Englishman or Frenchman dreams of

extending _his_ culture, _his_ language, _his_ influence, _his_

sovereignty. He takes pride in the thought that _his_ people rule in

distant lands, in deserts and jungles, in islands lying in tropical

seas, and on frozen tundras, where civilised man cannot live. It is

this dim mystic conception, this sense of an identification of a man's

small personality with a vast Imperium, that inspires the democracies,

which year by year vote supplies for imperialistic ventures,

far-sighted or absurd. Though this idealism is partly the expression

of an unrecognised economic need, yet for the most part, though perhaps

decreasingly, the average citizen looks at imperialism as a sort of

_aura_ to his beloved nation, and the conceptions {149} of national

prestige and of imperialistic dominion fuse.

Moreover, even the calmer minds are reached by the fundamental argument

of the necessity for extension. They recognise that despite the

brutality and bloodiness of colonialism, it at least represents a

certain phase or form of an inevitable development, the creation of an

economic unity of the World. Without colonial development, without an

exploitation of unlocked resources, the industrial growth of the

manufacturing countries cannot be maintained, and they will be thrown

back upon their own meagre resources. So long as agriculture remains

what it is to-day, the increasing millions of Western Europe, of Japan,

of the Eastern United States, must rely more and more upon their

commerce with the backward states, and must take a hand in stimulating

their production. The present nationalistic imperialism may not be the

best, it is perhaps the very worst form, that this world integration

might assume, but in any case the problem remains to be solved either

by this or some other means.

As a consequence the opposition to our present nationalistic

imperialism is tending to change from a merely negative attitude to a

positive programme for an imperialism at once humane, democratic and

international. It is an imperialism, the ideal of which is to

safe-guard the interests of the natives, to prepare them for

self-government and to carry on this process not by competition and war

between the interested nations but by mutual agreements for a common

benefit. The present cruelties and dangers are to be avoided. The

nations are to unite in a joint, higher imperialism.

It is this ideal which is to-day informing some of the leading minds of

Europe, an ideal which will convert the competitive imperialistic

strivings of rival nations into a joint and beneficent rule of

countries demonstrably {150} incapable of ruling themselves by a group

of nations acting in the interest of the world. Such a pooling of

claims is admittedly difficult and is likely to be opposed by immense

vested interests of classes and nations. It is this problem of a joint

imperialism, the solution of which alone stands between Europe and the

continuance of bitter strife and war.

[1] The profits from imperialism are only a part of the profits from

foreign investment. In an economic sense, England, France, Germany,

Holland and Belgium own parts of the United States, and the profits of

the Pennsylvania Railroad go largely to Europe as do the profits of

Egyptian railways. There is this difference: the United States retains

control of the physical property, and can, if it wishes, tax these

incomes out of existence, while Egypt can not.

[2] "'If social democracy is not yet in power, it has already a

position of influence which carries certain obligations. Its word

weighs very heavily in the scale.'"--Edward Bernstein, "Die

Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus," p. 145, quoted by Jane T. Stoddart.

"The New Socialism," New York and London, p. 156.

[3] Quoted by William English Walling, "The Socialists and the War,"

New York, 1915, p. 19.

[4] "The improvement of the lot of the workers has as a necessary

condition the prosperity of the industrial development; the ruin of

commerce and industry would encompass their own ruin. In a speech

delivered at Stuttgart, Mr. Wolfgang Heine, a socialist member of the

Reichstag, declared that 'the economic solidarity of the nation exists

despite all antagonism of interest between the classes, and that if the

German fatherland were conquered, the workers would suffer like the

employers and even more than these.'" "The alliance between trade

union socialism and military imperialism was manifested for the first

time at the Stuttgart (International Socialist) Congress in 1907. The

majority of German delegates, composed above all of trade union

representatives, were opposed to the Marxist resolution condemning

colonial wars."--"L'imperialisme des socialistes allemands," _La

Revue_, vol. cxii. Paris, 1915.

[5] In their admirable "History of Trade Unionism" Sidney and Beatrice

Webb ascribe the rapid increase in the growth and power of British

trade unions after 1850 in large part to the development of British

commerce and industry. "This success we attribute mainly to the spread

of education among the rank and file, and the more practical counsels

which began, after 1842, to influence the Trade Union world. But we

must not overlook the effect of economic changes. The period between

1825 and 1848 (in which "magnificent hopes ended in bitter

disillusionment") was remarkable for the frequency and acuteness of its

commercial depressions. From 1850 industrial expansion was for many

years both greater and steadier than in any previous period."

[6] This is the real but not the avowed policy of a large section of

the workers, especially of trade unionists, in the Social Democratic

Party of Germany.

[7] French Yellow Book, No. 5. The document, according to the German

commentators is falsely dated.

[8] French Yellow Book, No. 1. Annexe I.

{151}

CHAPTER XII

THE AMERICAN DECISION

We have seen how in Europe the outward expansion, which leads to

international friction and war, has been due to deep-lying economic

motives acting on ordinarily peace-loving populations. We have seen

how national interest, blended with class interest, has distorted this

expansion and has turned a wholesome process of world-development into

a reckless scramble for territory and a perpetually latent warfare.

Lastly we have seen how in all countries broad sections of the

population have been sickened by the stupid brutality and imminent

peril of this unenlightened nationalic competition and have groped for

some plan by which commerce might expand and industry grow without the

nations going to war.

Such a plan must involve a basis of agreement, if not a community of

interest, among nations requiring economic security and industrial

growth. The choice does not lie between national expansion and

contraction but between an expansion which ranges the nations in

hostile camps and one which affords more equal opportunities of

development to all competing powers. For each nation it is a choice

between a headlong national aggrandisement, which takes no account of

the needs and ambitions of other powers and the development of an

economic world system, in which the industrial growth of one nation

does not mean the stagnation or destruction of its neighbours.

Like the nations of Europe, the United States is faced {152} with the

necessity of making this decision. The problem presents itself less

clearly to us, since in the past we have largely expanded within; we

have been able to grow by a more intensive utilisation of what was

already conceded to us instead of spreading out into regions where

international competition was intense. Those classes which in other

countries are strongly driven by economic interest towards imperialism

were in America otherwise occupied. But to-day we are beginning to

overflow our boundaries, and we tend already to do instinctively what

in the future we may do of set purpose. The men who wish to use army

and navy to obtain American concessions in Mexico, South America and

China are not distantly related to the imperialists of Germany, who

believed that Kiau-chau was a fair exchange for two dead missionaries,

or to those of Great Britain and France who drove their nations into

the Boer War and the Morocco imbroglio. Our anti-imperialists also are

animated by ideals similar to those of European anti-imperialists.

The issue between these two groups and these two policies and ideals

does not result in a single act of the national will. We do not go to

the polls and vote once for all to be imperialistic or

non-imperialistic, to grab what we can or seek a concert of the world.

The issue resolves itself into many immediate and seemingly unrelated

decisions. What we shall do in Mexico to-day, what action we shall

take in regard to a railroad concession in China, opposed by Japan,

what part we shall take in the coming peace negotiations are a few of

the many decisions, which slowly crystallise into a national state of

mind and finally into a national policy. The policy need not be

absolutely rigid or consistent. While in the early days America

decided upon a policy of isolation, we did occasionally interfere in

Europe, and despite our emphatic Monroe {153} Doctrine, we made at

least one agreement--the Clayton Bulwer Treaty--in flat contradiction

to its principles.

The decision, which we are now making between Nationalistic Imperialism

and Internationalism[1] is of vast moment. It is a decision which

determines not only our foreign but our domestic policy. For Europe it

is equally important, since it influences the balance of power between

those groups that are fighting for and those fighting against

imperialism and militarism. By our comparative freedom of action, we

can exert an immense influence either in accentuating the struggle

between the industrial nations or in promoting a concert of action,

based upon a discovered community of interest.

How we shall in the end decide is not yet certain. Though we are still

upon the whole anti-imperialistic, voices already are raised in favour

of a vigorous imperialistic policy. "The imperialism of the American,"

writes one defender of a policy of indefinite expansion, "is a duty and

credit to humanity. He is the highest type of imperial master. He

makes beautiful the land he touches; beautiful with moral and physical

cleanliness.... There should be no doubt that even with all possible

moral refinement, it is the absolute right of a nation to live to its

full intensity, to expand, to found colonies, to get richer and richer

by any proper means such as armed {154} conquest, commerce, diplomacy.

Such expansion as an aim is an inalienable right and in the case of the

United States it is a particular duty, because we are idealists and are

therefore bound by establishing protectorates over the weak to protect

them from unmoral Kultur."[2]

It is not given to all imperialists to present their case with so naive

a self-deception. Not all would argue that it is our duty "to get

richer and richer by ... armed conquest" to avert the "unmoral Kultur"

of some other nation which also desires to get richer and richer. Yet

in many other forms our imperialistic drift appears. Voices call upon

us to perform deeds of blood and valour, which bring national renown.

Ardent prophecies reveal that we shall become the first maritime power

of the world and that we "are born to rule seas, as the Romans were to

conquer the world." But in the main American imperialistic sentiment

is not vocal. It manifests itself in a vague determination to push

American "interests" everywhere; to control Mexico and the Caribbean

countries, to exert an increasing influence in South America, to be a

decisive factor in China's exploitation. Just how all these ambitions

are to conflict with those of other imperialistic nations, our

imperialists have not yet determined. Let us be strong enough in our

own might and in our alliances and we can take what we want and find

excellent reasons for the taking.

Such a policy is not less dangerous because inchoate and undirected.

It is all the more dangerous on that account. Without thoroughly

understanding the World into which they inject their undefined

ambitions, our imperialists have not advanced far beyond a mental

attitude. They are {155} anxious to conquer and rule, to exert

economic, financial and military dominion, but their future domains are

not yet surveyed.

This new spirit has been strengthened by the passing of our isolation.

Since we cannot hold aloof, our imperialists believe that we must do as

other nations do, seize our fortune at any risk. We must repudiate

"our idealistic past," cease to be a dilettante in international

relationships, take our share of the burden and get our share of the

profits in the scrimmage which we call nationalistic imperialism. If

we cannot live by ourselves, let us live as do other aggressive nations.

In the future this new imperialism may drift in one of two directions.

We may build up an American Empire, a (probably plutocratic) Republic

with outlying dominions, or we may enter into a close association with

the British Empire, converting it gradually into an Anglo-American

Dominion.

The first method is the more obvious but also the more dangerous. To

secure a semi-economic, semi-political control over all North America,

south of the 49th parallel, to rule the Antilles and islands in the

Pacific, to control in part the policy of China, might be possible

without a British alliance. But any further imperialistic development

would meet with opposition. Almost all the valuable countries have

been pre-empted. To absorb Canada, to conquer Australia or New

Zealand, would mean relentless war against us by England and perhaps

other powers. Such a conflict, though undesired, is not impossible.

Even if it is not true, as one Latin-American writer confidently

prophesies, that "the disintegration of the Anglo-Saxon Empire will be

the work of the United States,"[3] there may {156} come many industrial

or commercial conflicts which in an imperialistic atmosphere may lead

to war. A policy of encroachment cannot but be dangerous.[4]

A more secure road to American imperialism lies in a closer union with

the British Empire. At present such a union would be opposed by an

overwhelming majority of Americans. In certain circles, however, there

is a perceptible movement towards an agreement with England which might

become an alliance and eventually a union.

For such a union there are strong arguments. The kinship in blood, the

similarity in language, traditions and points of view as well as a

certain range of common interests tend to bring these two nations into

closer relations. It would be a step towards a world-peace if the

United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South

Africa, Canada and Newfoundland were to be guaranteed against war among

themselves. The chance of peace is probably increased when the number

of possible conflicts between nations is lessened.

Unfortunately many who desire an Anglo-American alliance or union think

of it only as a means of protecting rights, the defence of which would

mean a circumscription of the rights of other nations and in the end a

world war. Writing over twenty years ago, Captain Mahan extolled the

idea of such an alliance (although he held it to be premature) on the

ground that with a strong navy the United States could help England to

control the seas. He deprecated the proposal that the coalition should

surrender the right to prey upon hostile commerce. It was only from

the relative weakness of Great Britain, "or possibly {157} from a

mistaken humanitarianism" that any concessions from the early rigours

of naval warfare were wrung by neutrals. The alliance between Great

Britain and the United States "looks ultimately and chiefly to the

contingency of war," and such an alliance "would find the two (nations)

united upon the ocean, consequently all-powerful there, and so

possessors of that mastership of the general situation which the sea

always has conferred upon its unquestioned rulers.... But why, then,

if supreme, concede to an enemy immunity for his commerce."[5]

Such an alliance would mean nothing less than an imperialistic

predominance in the world. The trans-oceanic colonies of all nations

would be held subject to Anglo-American consent. The power thus

possessed might be used with wisdom and moderation or unwisely and

immoderately. In either case the United States would enter upon the

patrimony of the British Empire. The interests controlling and

exploiting the vast resources of the Empire would come to be American

as well as British. Wall Street would make money throughout the

Empire, and we might some day find a Harvard graduate installed in the

governor's chair of Jamaica even if he did not actually become Viceroy

of India.

The pressure towards such an imperialistic merger grows with the

increasing sense in Great Britain of her precarious international

position. The British Empire is over-extended; it has too narrow a

base for the length of its frontier. In arguing for an Imperial

Federation, the _Round Table_ of London declared (in 1911) that "the

safety of the Imperial system cannot be maintained much longer by the

arrangements which exist at present.... Great Britain alone cannot

indefinitely guarantee the {158} Empire from disruption by external

attack. The farther one looks ahead the more obvious does this become.

A nation of 45,000,000 souls, occupying a small territory and losing

much of the natural increase in its population by emigration, cannot

hope to compete in the long run even against single powers of the first

magnitude--even Russia, for instance, with its 150,000,000 inhabitants,

with America with its 90,000,000, with Germany with its 65,000,000

increasing by nearly a million a year, to say nothing of China with its

430,000,000 souls. Far less can it hope to maintain the dominant

position it has hitherto occupied in the world, with a dozen new powers

entering upon the scene.... What will be the position of the Empire

then, if it has to depend upon the navy of England alone?"[6]

Even with the addition of the self-governing colonies, the population

of the United Kingdom is increased by less than a third,[7] and the

sixty millions of the six British nations are little more capable of

defending the British Empire than are the forty-five millions of the

United Kingdom. The advantage of far more than doubling the population

back of the British Empire is therefore apparent. As compared with the

United States, Great Britain is growing slowly. Moreover she is in a

permanently perilous situation, lying near the strongest military

powers and unable to recover, once her navy is destroyed. Great

Britain preserves her empire only by alliances which {159} prevent the

forming of a hostile European coalition, and in the future an American

alliance may seem indispensable to the maintenance of the Empire and

even to the safety of Britain. At such time it may appear better to

divide and rule than risk the chance of ruin by carrying the burden

alone.

This problem of defence is not one of valour but of economic resources

and geographical position. The men of Britain are as courageous to-day

as were their forefathers, but just as the brave Hollanders could not

maintain supremacy on the sea because with their small numbers they

were forced to make front against the French, so the English are now

compelled to face an increasingly difficult international situation.

In war, bulk, territory and weight of numbers count, and how these

factors will affect the relation between Great Britain (even with her

colonies) and other strong powers a half-century hence is a serious

question. There is always the unpleasant possibility that a failure of

the clever diplomacy by which Great Britain has hitherto divided her

enemies will some day incite an attack from an overwhelming coalition

of land-hungry powers.

To American imperialists an invitation to share in the profits,

prestige and cost of maintenance of the British Empire might prove an

overwhelming temptation. America would become an imperialistic people

by adoption. Without having laboured and fought we should overnight

enter upon a joint control of the greatest imperium the world has seen.

Together with Britain it would be ours to enjoy, and in the common

possession of these vast domains the divisive forces between the

British and American peoples would vanish. Our American historians

would forget that there had ever been a Revolutionary War or would

interpret that incident as a purely internal {160} conflict, which

temporarily lost us a few excellent islands, since regained.

But if the British Empire, to say nothing of new rights, privileges and

possessions would be ours to enjoy, it would also be ours to defend.

An Anglo-American Empire would arouse the envy and the fear of other

nations. We should have to defend not only our new joint dependencies

but the most distant approaches to them. We could not rest quietly

unarmed with these possessions in our house.

An Anglo-American imperialism, indeed any Anglo-American alliance which

does not include France, Germany, Russia and other powers, thus brings

us no nearer to peace or to a solution of the international problem.

It is but the prelude to a new balance of power, a new alignment of

hostile national ambitions. If Great Britain and the United States

grow and prevent other nations from growing, exploit and prevent other

nations from exploiting, we shall be merely reproducing the present

fatal scission of Europe upon a large scale.

As against this ideal of American Imperialism, on its own account or in

alliance with the greatest imperialistic power, stands the ideal of

internationalism. It is an ideal which looks forward towards the

creation of a concert of interest among the nations, the growth of

international law and the more equal utilisation of the world by the

nations. It is an ideal which can be realised only as nations perceive

that their ultimate advantage lies in compromising their extreme

demands and merging national interests in a larger international

interest.

To-day an overwhelming majority of Americans desire a foreign policy

looking towards internationalism. They prefer to strive for peace in

America and Europe rather than to attempt any imperialistic expansion

likely to perpetuate the war-breeding competition between nations.

{161}

To realise this ideal, indeed to make any progress whatsoever towards

its realisation, we must seek to alter the economic web in which the

nations of the world now live. There is at present a conflict between

two principles, economic nationalism and economic internationalism.

Each nation seeks to obtain for itself security, progress and a

favoured position; each has its separate national ambitions. At the

same time all the industrial nations have a common interest in

maintaining themselves upon the resources of the agricultural

countries, and in building up a vast system, in which the world's

resources will be utilised most efficiently for the benefit of the

world inhabitants.

The problem, therefore, is to promote this economic internationalism

and to limit as far as possible the disturbing influence of the

divisive national interests. We cannot destroy and we cannot ignore

nationalism. We cannot resolve humanity into a mass of denationalised

atoms, citizens of the world with no economic or political allegiance

to any state. All we can do is so to compromise and adjust strong and

vital national claims, as to permit the growth of the international

interest. The progress of economic internationalism, without which a

permanent peace cannot be maintained, is to be furthered only as each

nation attains to a political and economic security, both in the

present and for the future. If a reasonable degree of industrial,

commercial and colonial progress can be guaranteed, so that the great

industrial nations do not live in constant peril, the vast forces which

make for an international exploitation of the world's resources will be

unchained. A common right to the use of the highway of the sea, a

joint imperialism, an international development of commerce and of

industry, a mutual insurance of the nations against war, and against

national aggression likely to lead to war, will be factors in the

establishment of an economic {162} internationalism, which is the next

stage in the economic development of the world.

The United States cannot by itself create a new economic world system;

all that it can do is to contribute with other nations to the removal

of obstacles that retard the coming development. The opportunity to

advance this movement, however, is greater in the case of the United

States than in that of the nations of Europe. A nation tends to prefer

its immediate national interest to its larger but more distant

international interest directly in proportion to the economic or

political danger in which it lives. Because of our wealth, our sparse

population and our relative immunity from attack, it devolves upon us

to be the leader in the promotion of an economic internationalism.

This potential leadership of ours, however, may be lost as a result of

an unfavourable economic and social development in the future. What

our attitude towards internationalism, nationalism, imperialism and war

is to be ten, thirty or fifty years from now will depend upon our

internal development. We cannot decide for a policy of

internationalism if we grow to be an over-populated country of

impoverished men, with great capitalists pushing us out towards foreign

adventures, economic and military. An imperialistic war-like spirit

will arise if the internal pressure upon the population becomes

excessive.

In measuring this pressure, we are dealing with relatives, not

absolutes. During many centuries the Chinese coolies have become so

accommodated to a meagre life that they do not seek to conquer other

nations but choose rather to starve quietly within their walls. There

is a higher standard of living in Germany to-day than in the more

pacific Germany of seventy years ago, but desires have increased more

rapidly than wages. As a result the nation is forced outwards.

{163}

Though in many respects conditions of life in America are improving,

discontent and frustrated ambition increase. As our numbers grow,

farms become relatively scarce, and a class of tenant farmers and an

agricultural proletariat develop. The chances of success for both

these classes are slighter than a generation ago. Manufacturing is

conducted on an ever larger scale and the opportunity to rise is

becoming less. The openings in retail trade, though many, are small,

and there are vast numbers of failures. Wages are less in relation to

the standards of living surrounding the workman, and fear of

unemployment is chronic. The country is full of poor men with no firm

purchase on life. Income, it is true, is more evenly distributed than

property, but even here a crass inequality reigns. Upon the

wage-earners falls the heavy incidence of industrial injuries, disease,

and unemployment.

It is of such conditions that imperialism and wars are made. To

develop millions of landless men without wealth and with precarious

jobs is to create a material superlatively inflammable. You can appeal

to such men for a "strong" policy that will conquer foreign markets and

therefore "jobs." There is a group much lower in economic status--the

men submerged below the poverty line. These men, with no money in

their pockets and no steady employment, but with voices, votes and

newspaper organs, are susceptible to jingoism. They have a high narrow

sensibility created by precariousness and hunger. Here we are creating

a culture for war bacteria. The concentration of wealth at the top of

our society acts similarly. We are developing in America, the type of

big business adventurer, who desires an aggressive foreign policy, not

only for his direct business interests, but also to allay unrest at

home by pointing a minatory finger at the foreigner beyond our borders.

{164}

Already we have many of the elements that go to make up the war spirit.

In the present conflict we have been pacific owing to the division of

our sympathies, the deadening realisation of the immense forces engaged

and losses incurred, and the realisation that our interests were not

involved. To these factors there was added a sudden prosperity

contingent upon our remaining at peace. But even as early as 1898,

when the proletarisation of America was less developed, we had millions

of inflamed patriots, who would willingly have fought all Europe rather

than "haul down our flag" in the Philippines. What will happen twenty

years from now, when our export trade is greater and more necessary and

when (unless we change conditions) there will be more poverty and

insecurity than to-day? If at such a time Germany, Japan or Russia, or

all three, determine upon an action, which will injure our pretensions

and throw many of our citizens out of work, we shall surely feel

resentment. We cannot safely predict that we will adopt a gentle

attitude. Like France in 1870, like Russia in 1905, we may stumble

into a war over our rights and pretensions, may be rushed into it not

only because of a conflict of interests which we did not foresee but

because of a vicious internal development which we did not avert.

All our customary self-assurances that we shall never fight nations now

friendly are mere deception. So we thought just before the war of

1812. We were never more pacific than in 1895 when we ventured on a

desperate challenge to England, or in 1898 when we attacked Spain.

Though we averted war with Germany over the _Lusitania_ matter, our

public mind was so uninformed that we might easily have been pushed

into the conflict by a more bellicose President. We should have a

better chance of keeping the peace if we were not so blindly confident

of our {165} peacefulness. It takes only one to make a quarrel, and

the aggressor might not impossibly be ourselves. Nor can peace be

predicted on the ground that we have given no offence and do not intend

to give offence. The other nation will be the judge of that. And if

we become imperialistic we shall have given offence enough.

Neither will our religion, our almost universal Christianity, strike

the weapons from our hands. It is doubtful whether religion ever kept

a nation out of war. The Germans and the English are both Christian

peoples and therefore quite willing to fight God's battle, which is

their battle. If a crisis arose in America out of our economic

conflicts with Europe and our own psychological instability, we should

find the ministers of the Gospel on the same side as the editors,

politicians, and the people generally, as they have been at most times

when peace has been threatened. A war rooted perhaps in the rival

interests of American and foreign oil companies in Venezuela would be

hailed on both sides as a battle for civilisation and the Lord. Not

even our diversity of racial stocks would prevent such a war, though it

would no doubt make us hesitant. We should be loath to fight against

Germany, Austria, Italy or England, because of the presence in our

midst of natives of these lands. Once the fighting had begun, however,

all opposition would be overcome, and the war would go on despite its

spiritual costs.

If we are to decide therefore not for imperialism and imperialistic

wars but for a policy which will mean peace for ourselves and peace and

international reorganisation for Europe and the World, we must begin

our labours at home. Unless we are able to build a democratic

civilisation upon the basis of a thoroughly scientific utilisation of

our own resources, unless we so direct our American development that we

shall not be forced to fight for a {166} larger share of the remaining

exploitable regions, we shall make little progress towards a settlement

of the grave problems which now divide the nations. To promote an

economic internationalism we must make our own internal economic

development sound; to help cure the World we must maintain our own

health. Internationalism begins at home.

[1] It is difficult to find terms in which to express clearly the two

policies between which we are choosing. In a sense the issue is

between imperialism and internationalism, but since any international

attempt to solve the problem of the backward countries must lead to

some joint occupation, exploitation or dominion, which may be called

imperialistic, the opposition of the two terms is not complete. Nor do

the terms Nationalism and Internationalism describe the two policies.

The internationalism for which we are striving does not negate

nationalism. It is not a cosmopolitanism, a world-union of

undifferentiated and denationalized individuals, but a policy of

compounding and accommodating permanent and distinct national interests.

[2] _Seven Seas Magazine_ (Organ of the Navy League of the United

States), Nov., 1915, pp. 27-28.

[3] F. Garcia Calderon, "Latin-America. Its Rise and Progress." New

York, 1915, p. 390.

[4] A second prophecy of Senor Calderon is to the effect that "unless

some extraordinary event occurs to disturb the evolution of the modern

peoples, the great nations of industrial Europe and Japan, the champion

of Asiatic integrity, will oppose the formidable progress of the United

States."--_Op. cit._, 389.

[5] Mahan (A. T.), "Possibilities of an Anglo-American Reunion."

_North American Review_, July, 1894.

[6] _Round Table_, London, May, 1911, pp. 251-2 (?).

[7] The combined white population of New Zealand, Australia, South

Africa, Newfoundland and Canada (in 1911) was only 14.2 millions, or

almost exactly the increase in the (total) population of Continental

United States in the one decade ending 1910. The white population of

the United States already constitutes 4/7 of the total white

English-speaking population of the world. Moreover, population is

increasing far more rapidly in the United States than in the six

British nations.

{169}

PART III

TOWARDS ECONOMIC INTERNATIONALISM