AN ANTIDOTE TO IMPERIALISM
A nation, though economically complete, in the sense that it could, if
it desired, maintain its population upon its own resources may yet be
lured into an imperialistic and warlike policy. Just as political
disintegration leads to internal conflicts, disorders and finally
foreign intervention, so an economic disequilibrium, by placing the
interests of certain classes within the arena of international friction
may evoke a struggle, which can have no other issue than war.
This is exactly the effect, for example, of a gross inequality of
wealth and income. Such an inequality means that multi-millionaires,
gaining far more than they can spend, are impelled to invest their
surplus funds in outside ventures. The capital that can be profitably
absorbed by industries manufacturing for home consumption depends upon
the ability of the population to purchase food, clothes, houses,
furniture, watches, and automobiles. If the population cannot or will
not increase purchases at a rate commensurate with the increase of
national savings, a vast capital must either be diverted to
manufacturing for the export trade or must itself be exported. Neither
of these deflections is in itself bad; in moderation, both are good.
There is, however, a certain degree of intensity of competition for
foreign trade and investment which means industrial war and the danger
of military war. The wider the interval between {187} national savings
and national consumption, the more powerful and dangerous is this
expulsive tendency of capital.
Such a tendency may arise in a country in which, despite an equality in
wealth, the national savings are excessive, but the greatest danger is
in countries in which the returns to capital, rent and business
enterprise are large and the returns to labour small. The big profits
come from the manufacture of articles of common use, and the home
demand for such articles is limited by the consuming capacity of poor
men. The surplus capital must therefore find a vent, and the larger
this surplus capital, the more venturesome it grows and the more
insistently it demands that the state back up its enterprises.
We may trace this development in the recent history of Great Britain.
Though British wages rose during the half century ending in 1900, the
consuming capacity of the masses was not sufficient to employ the
rapidly expanding capital. British capital went everywhere; among
other places to the Transvaal. There was more money in "Kaffirs" than
in making socks for the British artisan, and if international friction
resulted from this capital export, it was all the better, or at least
none the worse, for the financiers. The men who controlled the Rand
mines knew when shares were to rise and when they were to fall, and
profited by their knowledge. Nor were war preparations
disadvantageous. An extra Dreadnought helped British capital more than
would the expenditure of the cost of such a vessel in increasing the
wages of school teachers. Yet it was because school teachers and other
wage-earners in Britain, as in many other countries, were poorly paid,
that the accumulating capital of the nations was forced increasingly
into foreign lands and into imperialistic ventures. Morocco, Egypt,
Korea and Manchuria offered larger rewards than did the highly {188}
competitive businesses which depended on the custom of French, English
and Russian peasants or wage-earners. The inequality in the
distribution of wealth proved to be a stimulus to imperialistic
competition.
Those who are satisfied with things as they are never tire of speaking
of this distribution of wealth as an immutable thing, protected by
economic laws more potent than legislative enactments. They insist
that law cannot control the expansion of capital or the distribution of
wealth. But our whole system of distribution is based on law. If
England had not preserved entail and primogeniture, if France had not
decreed the equal inheritance by all children, if the United States had
not adopted a liberal land policy, the distribution of wealth in each
of these countries would have been far different. Within wide limits
the economic course of the nation can be controlled.
Such a peaceful programme for creating a better distribution of wealth,
a wider consumption and therefore a larger employment of capital in
industries for home consumption has the added advantage that it is a
policy in complete harmony with the interests of great sections of the
population. The average man desires peace feebly; he does not think of
it day and night and is not willing to fight for it. But he is willing
to fight for things which actually contribute more towards peace than
do arbitration treaties. The demand of the workman for higher wages,
shorter hours and better conditions is, whether the wage-earner knows
it or not, a demand for international peace. Progressive income and
inheritance taxes, the regulation of railroads and industrial
corporations, the conservation of natural resources are all opposed to
an imperialistic policy leading to war. In short the entire {189}
democratic struggle against the narrow concentration of wealth, by
increasing the demand for capital within the country, tends to preserve
us from a meddlesome, domineering, dangerous imperialism.
To increase the consumption of the masses of our people is easier for
us than for Germany or England because of our wider economic base, our
bulk, territory and immense potential wealth. To increase wages, we
need not, like the crowded countries of western Europe, acquire new
resources beyond our borders. We already have a place in the sun, and
out of our waste can extract more than can Germany or France out of
colonies for which they must fight. It is easier for us to increase
industrial rewards because we now waste more in our unregulated
scramble for wealth than Germany gains in her scientific, economical
use of her smaller resources. Compared to industrial Germany we are a
spendthrift nation. Had Germany our resources and numbers, she would
be peaceful and rich; were we obliged to live on her narrow territory,
we should be bellicose and impoverished.
Not that Germany has solved the whole problem; all she has learned is
to be efficient. Her early poverty taught her to make a little go a
great way, to combine the peasant's industry and parsimony with the
far-flung plans of the business organiser. So capably has she done
this that living conditions have improved as her population has
increased. Where all nations have as yet failed, however, is in the
distribution of the industrial product. In the end a gross inequality
of wealth and income, as we find it in all developed countries, is
another form of waste. It means fewer economic satisfactions, less
true value. A few billion dollars added to the income of twenty
thousand families is of less utility than when distributed among {190}
twenty millions. Inequality of wealth, moreover, involves low wages,
over-work, child labour, insecurity, unemployment, preventable disease,
premature death, in short, a bad economy. It also involves an
inability on the part of the masses to consume the product of
industries in which the wealthy invest.
The economic inequality in the United States does not as yet present
the same imminent dangers as in certain European countries. Wealth, it
is true, is most unevenly distributed,[1] but while incomes are also
very unequal,[2] the rate of wages[3] and the returns to farmers and to
small business men are far greater than in the industrial countries of
Europe. Our statistics of consumption reveal an immense and constantly
increasing demand for all kinds of articles and services. As compared
with England or Germany the distribution of income in the United States
permits a high standard of living and creates a vast demand for the use
of capital in industries for home consumption.
There is, however, a danger that these conditions may grow worse. An
unrestricted growth of the population {191} either through natural
increase or immigration would tend to increase monopoly profits and
reduce real wages, thus accentuating the inequality of distribution and
forcing an enormous surplus capital to be devoted to foreign trade and
foreign investments. On the other hand there is an opportunity to
improve our conditions. There is still a wide margin for a real
increase in wages, for shorter hours, better labour conditions,
improved education, improved recreational facilities, and in general a
deflection of a large part of the national dividend to the improvement
of the conditions of life of the whole population.
For a long time Americans ignored the necessity of any such social
policy. We were almost as wasteful of our human as of our physical
resources. From birth to burial we regarded our men and women as human
accidents, who died or lived, languished or grew great, as
circumstances decreed. Though in recent decades we have approached to
a keener sense of collective national responsibility, we still suffer
not only from a high infantile death-rate but also from a disastrous
neglect of children who survive. Our educational system is still
rudimentary, conventional, and ill adapted to our economic needs.
There is little industrial education, less vocational guidance, and
almost no care at all for the adjustment of the educational system to
the later needs of the children. Millions of children, who in the next
generation are to decide questions of war or peace, are growing up,
anemic, underfed, intellectually sterile, and without morale, firmness
or strength. Our slums, our low wages, our evil conditions in mines
and sweat-shops unite to give us the tramp, the corner loafer, the
exploiter of vice, the criminal. Such conditions are in every sense
dangerous to our peace as also to our well-being. They mean a low
economic efficiency, a restricted consumption, a barrier to the proper
capitalisation of our country. {192} Apart from this, the corruption
arising out of such conditions menaces our national character. We hear
praise to-day of the iron discipline of the German army, but we hear
less of the discipline of the German school, factory system, social
legislation, trade-union. If millions of Americans are shiftless,
shuffling, undisciplined and only vaguely and crudely patriotic, the
cause is to be found in our neglect of the lessons of modern social
life.
To state these conditions of human waste and exploitation is to suggest
the remedies. All such remedies cost money, hundreds of millions.
There is no progress without higher taxes, better spent, and we shall
not advance except by the path of a vast increase in collective
expenditure for common purposes. In the end, of course, such
improvements will pay for themselves. If we spent fifty millions a
year upon agricultural education, we could easily reimburse ourselves
out of our increased production. We spend over five hundred million
dollars annually upon public elementary and secondary education, a sum
much greater than that spent in any other country. If, however, we
could efficiently organise our school system, we could more profitably
spend three times as much. There are many other chances for the
ultimately profitable investment of our capital upon agencies which
make for a more intelligent, active, industrious and self-disciplined
population.
There is an added use to which such higher taxation may be put. By
means of a larger collective expenditure, a more equal distribution of
income and a wider consumption by the masses may be secured. What can
be attained by industrial action, such as strikes, can be effected in
even greater measure through fiscal action. Taxes, to redress
inequality, should be sharply graduated. By taxes on unearned
increment and monopoly profits, by the {193} regulation of the wages,
prices, dividends and profits of great corporations, we could
increasingly divert large sums to wage-earners, consumers, stockholders
and to the nation as a whole. By increasing the consumption both of
individuals and of the national unit, such taxation would give an
impetus to home industrial development. If this deflection of wealth
from the rich caused a temporary lack of capital, the resulting rise in
interest rates would stimulate saving and repair the evil.
Such a progress would mean not only an advance towards a fuller, freer
and more active life for the population but also a diminution of the
impulse to imperialistic adventure and war. An increased income for
the men at the bottom creates a broader economic base, a less top-heavy
structure, with smaller necessity for support from without. It
increases our home market, widens the home investment field and reduces
the intense sharpness of competition for the profits of the backward
countries. It affords the opportunity to be disinterested in foreign
policy and to work for the promotion of international peace. Equally
important is its effect upon the national psychology. It gives the
people a stake at home. A device, familiar to certain statesmen, is to
divert the people's minds from domestic affairs by arousing animosity
against the foreigner. Is it impossible to allay hatred of the
foreigner by concentrating interest on home concerns?
Psychologically this process is nothing but immunisation. A disease
may be resisted by the absence in the blood and tissues of substances
needed by the bacteria for their growth and increase. As we may
immunise the body, so we may immunise the mind of individual or nation.
We protect our children from error, not by forbidding the publication
of false doctrine but by creating in the child's mind a true knowledge
and a faculty of {194} criticism. Similarly to guard against the
infection of the war spirit a public opinion can be created in which
war bacteria will find no nutriment.
To immunise society is not, however, a mere juggler's trick; we cannot
ask Washington to legislate us into immunity. What is needed is a
potent social change, arousing enthusiasms and antagonisms, and
involving a new attitude towards business and politics, freedom and
discipline; a new efficiency; a new balance of power within society; a
new attitude towards the state; a new value placed upon the life of
each individual. Such a change involves a patriotism so exigent that
the nation will resent poverty in Fall River or Bethlehem as it resents
murder in Mexico. Many Americans would find such a revolution in our
conditions and attitudes uninteresting or worse; some, with vast
material interests at stake, would prefer a dozen wars. Against this
indifference and opposition, the change, if it comes, must make its way.
Such a progress would not, of course, create perpetual peace within the
community. We read much to-day of satiated nations, unwilling to fight
for more, but considered from within, there is no satiated society.
Everywhere groups fight for economic, political or social advancement.
In a democratic community the mass of the people, and especially the
manual workers, though in a more favourable economic situation, would
still be unsatisfied. Conflict would endure. It is well that it
should be so, for a society in which all were contented in a
buttressed, routine life would go to war through sheer boredom.
The economic antidote to imperialism thus resolves itself into a very
necessary intellectual and emotional antidote. The lure of war
persists even to-day, when soldiers dig themselves into burrows and
individual courage is lost in the vast magnitude of the contest. Nor
can you {195} counteract the temptation to fight (or have others fight)
by preaching sermons against war, for the sermon and the bugle-call
seem to appeal to different cells in the brain. All you can do is to
polarise a man's thoughts and inspire him with other interests,
ambitions and ideals. A full, varied, intense life is a better
antidote than a mere vacuity of existence, without toil, pleasure, pain
or excitement. In his search for an antidote to war, William James
points out how utterly the ordinary pacifist ignores the stubborn
instincts that impel men to battle. "We inherit," he says, "the
war-like type.... Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and
marrow, and thousands of years won't breed it out of us. The popular
imagination fairly fattens on the thoughts of war." The men at the
bottom of society, James assures us, "are as tough as nails and
physically and morally almost as insensitive," and if not to these then
to all "who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavours ... the
whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and
dishwatery." For the discipline of war, William James wishes to
substitute another and more strenuous discipline, "a conscription of
the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a
part of the army enlisted against _Nature_." "The military ideals of
hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the
people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are
blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the
permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and
iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to
dish-washing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and
tunnel-making, to foundries and stokeholes, and to the frames of
sky-scrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to
their choice, to get the {196} childishness knocked out of them, and to
come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideals."[4]
Even in a society which would permit an industrial conscription both of
rich and poor, a certain latent bellicosity, making for war, would
undoubtedly persist. There seems to be an irreducible minimum of
jingoism, just as whatever your precautions, you cannot quite do away
with rats or noxious germs. No nation is free from this cheapest
intoxicant. You may find it with the expensive American on his travels
or on the cracker-barrels in the country store and you cannot help
stumbling over it in the yellow journals and in many dull and
respectable newspapers which do not know that they are yellow. Even
the self-depreciating type of American may turn out to be a jingo if
you will trouble to take off his peel.
Such jingoism, however, though unpleasant may be quite innocuous. We
all have a trace of it as we all are supposed to have a trace of
tuberculosis. So long as our jingoes confine themselves to merely
trumpeting national virtues, actual and imputed, we may rest content.
Such men will scarcely be capable of stirring a whole population to
war, if men are living under decent conditions, struggling for still
better conditions, and competing on a high plane. If we can secure
prosperity, efficiency and equality and can make life fuller, more
intense, varied and romantic, the ravages of jingoism will be
circumscribed.
It will be argued, however, that though we make our conditions what we
will we shall still be anxious to fight at the first opportunity. "It
is evident," says Prof. Sumner,[5] {197} "that men love war; when two
hundred thousand men in the United States volunteer in a month for a
war with Spain which appeals to no sense of wrong against their country
and to no other strong sentiment of human nature, when their lives are
by no means monotonous or destitute of interest, and where life offers
chances of wealth and prosperity, the pure love of adventure and war
must be strong in our population." If two hundred thousand volunteer
for a war when we are not obviously attacked, will not the whole
country go to war for the sake of "honour"?
It would be foolish to answer this question categorically; no one can
predict what a nation will do when wounded in its self-esteem. The
heir of thousands of centuries of fighting, man is to-day, as always, a
fragile container of dynamite, not guaranteed against explosion, and
there are experts in the touching off of dynamite. When Bismarck
falsified the Ems despatch he knew exactly what its effect would be
upon the French sense of honour. But "honour" is an ambiguous word,
meaning everything, from a scrupulous regard to national obligations
freely entered upon to a mere truculent bellicosity. The honour of
nations, in the sense that nations usually fight for honour, is mere
prestige, and prestige is not much more than an acknowledgment of
formidableness. The Danes and the Dutch are honourable, but, in the
sense in which the word is ordinarily used, neither Denmark nor Holland
can afford honour. The claims of national honour, moreover, are
strangely shadowy and transitory. What seems imperatively demanded by
honour at the moment becomes insignificant later. For a number of
years the United States paid tribute to the Barbary pirates; our
citizens were sold into slavery and his Serene Majesty, the Dey of
Algiers, treated our representative in a manner which a great power
to-day would hardly adopt in an ultimatum to {198} Paraguay or San
Marino.[6] But it was not then convenient to fight and so we pocketed
our honour until a more convenient occasion. The Dey of Algiers has
long since gone to the scrap-pile of history, while the United States
remains, a respected and honourable nation.
Nations which are sure of themselves, like men who respect themselves,
are somewhat slower to resent affronts than nations which are insecure
and fearsome. In 1914 Austria was solicitous of her honour, which, she
believed, was assailed by Servia, and Russia was solicitous of hers,
for these two powers were engaged in a contest over the fears and
prepossessions of the Balkan States, and "honour" meant adherents. But
when in the same year, a Mexican government offered what was believed
to be an affront to the United States, our people were in no mood to
feel insulted. We did not need prestige. After all, questions of
honour are usually questions of interest. In the _Lusitania_
controversy, we did not receive the apologies which we believed were
due to us. But as we had no interest in fighting Germany, and as
Germany gained less from her submarine campaign than she would have
lost in a war with us, the matter was amicably, though not logically,
settled or at least postponed. Had we, however, been in a different
economic position, had a few million unemployed men been striking,
rioting and threatening to revolt, or, on the other hand had we had
plans for our aggrandisement at the expense of Germany, acts of war
would have followed within twenty-four hours of the massacre. We
should have been far more "jealous in honour." But we were otherwise
engaged. The headlines were full of the events {199} in Europe and the
horror of that tragedy in the Atlantic, but the gaze of America was
inward. We were interested day by day in the ambitions of peace.
Thus our hope of remaining at peace ourselves and of contributing to
the peace and economic reorganisation of the world depends not only
upon the conservation and development of our natural resources but also
upon a distribution of wealth and income which will widen the
consumption by the masses and will give to the whole population the
opportunity of a full, varied and purposeful life. All these things,
as well as the moral discipline which is so urgently needed, can be
secured only as we learn to apply a national policy to our own nation.
It is our own slackness, our own "state-blindness," our lack of a
complete democracy, which increases our chances of imperialism and war.
It is, on the other hand, our increasing willingness to take a national
view of internal affairs, our increasing desire to base American
prosperity upon American resources and to make life fuller and more
valuable, that acts as a deterrent to war and fits us for the difficult
task of contributing to a world peace.
Finally such a contribution to the peace of the world implies the
condition that our own foreign policy shall not be in conflict with the
international ideals which we are seeking to promote. If we ourselves
are interested in the parcelling out of backward countries, we shall
not be able to exert a restraining influence upon nations whose
necessities are greater than ours. By this is not meant that we are to
stay at home completely and enjoy no rights beyond our borders. Such
an effacement would mean a monastic seclusion for the United States.
But while in the world beyond there is a fair field for peaceful
competition, in which we also may take our part, our hope of promoting
economic internationalism depends upon our not playing {200} a lone
hand, upon our abstention from a selfish and short-sighted policy of
national aggression and upon our free co-operation with other nations
seeking the goal of international peace.
[1] According to estimates based on studies of estates probated in
Massachusetts and Wisconsin, it appears that 2 per cent. of the
population owned almost 60 per cent. of the wealth while the poorest 65
per cent. of the population died in possession of only about 5 per
cent. of the wealth. See King (W. I.), "The Wealth and Income of the
People of the United States," New York, 1915; also cited sources.
[2] Twenty per cent. of the population receive 47.2 per cent. of
national income and the remaining eighty per cent. of the population
52.8 per cent. of the national income.--King, _op. cit._, p. 235.
[3] From 1880 to 1910 the total wages (and salaries) paid in the United
States increased from 3.8 to 14.3 thousands of millions of dollars; the
average wage increased from $323 to $507; the increase in the annual
wages, taking into account differences in the cost of living, was 64
per cent. For basis of these calculations see King.
[4] William James. The Moral Equivalent of War. In "Memories and
Studies." New York. Longmans, Green & Co. 1912.
[5] Sumner (William Graham). "War and Other Essays," New Haven (Yale
University Press), 1913, p. 29.
[6] "In 1800 Captain Bainbridge, arriving at Algiers with the usual
tribute, was ordered to carry dispatches to Constantinople. 'You pay
me tribute,' explained the Dey, 'by which you become my slaves, and
therefore I have a right to order you as I think proper.'"--Fish.
(Carl Russell.) "American Diplomacy," New York (1915), p. 141.
{201}