The American Empire Part 25

Such a program would be a departure from the traditions of American public life, but the traditions, built by a nation of farmers, have already lost their significance. They are historic, with no contemporary justification. The economic life that has grown up since 1870 of necessity will create new public policies.

The success of such a program would depend upon four things:

1. A coordination of American economic life.

2. A fast grip on the agencies for shaping public opinion.

3. A body of citizens, martial, confident, restless, ambitious.

4. A ruling cla.s.s with sufficient imagination to paint, in warm sympathetic colors, the advantages of world dominion; and with sufficient courage to follow out imperial policy, regardless of ethical niceties, to its logical goal of world conquest.

All four of these requisites exist in the United States to-day, awaiting the master hand that shall unite them. Many of the leaders of American public life know this. Some shrink from the issue, because they are unaccustomed to dream great dreams, and are terrified by the immensity of large thoughts. Others lack the courage to face the new issues. Still others are steadily maneuvering themselves into a position where they may take advantage of a crisis to establish their authority and work their imperial will. The situation grows daily more inviting; the opportunity daily more alluring. The war-horse, saddled and bridled, is pawing the earth and neighing. How soon will the rider come?

4. _Eat or Be Eaten_

The American ruling cla.s.s has been thrown into a position of authority under a system of international economic compet.i.tion that calls for initiative and courage. Under this system, there are two possibilities,--eat or be eaten!

There is no middle ground, no half way measure. It is impossible to stop or to turn back. Like men engaged on a field of battle, the contestants in this international economic struggle must remain with their faces toward the enemy, fighting for every inch that they gain, and holding these gains with their bodies and their blood, or else they must turn their backs, throw away their weapons, run for their lives, and then, hiding on the neighboring hills, watch while the enemy despoils the camp, and then applies a torch to the ruins.

The events of the great war prove, beyond peradventure, that in the wolf struggle among the capitalist nations, no rules are respected and no quarter given. Again and again the leaders among the allied statesmen--particularly Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson--appealed to the German people over the heads of their masters with a.s.surances that the war was being fought against German autocracy, not against Germans.

"When will the German people throw off their yoke?" asked one Allied diplomat. The answer came in November, 1918. A revolution was contrived, the Kaiser fled the country, the autocracy was overthrown. Germans ceased to fight with the understanding that Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points should be made the foundation of the Peace. The armistice terms violated the spirit if not the letter of the fourteen points; the Peace Treaty scattered them to the winds. Under its provisions Germany was stripped of her colonies; her investments in the allied possessions were confiscated; her s.h.i.+ps were taken; three-quarters of her iron ore and a third of her coal supply were turned over to other powers; motor trucks, locomotives, and other essential parts of her economic mechanism were appropriated. Austria suffered an even worse fate, being "drawn and quartered" in the fullest sense of the term. After stripping the defeated enemies of all available booty, levying an indeterminate indemnity, and dismembering the German and Austrian Empires, the Allies established for thirty years a Reparation Commission, which is virtually the economic dictator of Europe. Thus for a generation to come, the economic life of the vanquished Empires will be under the active supervision and control of the victors. Never did a farmer's wife pluck a goose barer than the Allies plucked the Central Powers. (See the Treaty, also "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," J. M. Keynes. New York, Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920.)

Under the armistice terms and the Peace Treaty the Allies did to Germany and Austria exactly what Germany and Austria would have done to France and Great Britain had the war turned out differently. The Allied statesmen talked much about democracy, but when their turn came they plundered and despoiled with a practiced imperial hand. France and Britain, as well as Germany and Austria, were capitalist Empires. The Peace embodies the essential economic morality of capitalist imperialism, the morality of "Eat or be eaten."

5. _The Capitalists and War_

The people and even the masters of America are inexperienced in this international struggle. Among themselves they have experimented with compet.i.tive industrialism on a national scale. Now, brought face to face with the world struggle, many of them revolt against it. They deplore the necessities that lead nations to make war on one another. They supported the late war "to end war." They gave, suffered and sacrificed with a keen, idealistic desire to "make the world safe for democracy."

They might as well have sought to scatter light and suns.h.i.+ne from a cloudbank.

The masters of Europe, who have learned their trade in long years of intrigue, diplomacy and war, feel no such repugnance. They play the game. The American people are of the same race-stocks as the leading contestants in the European struggle. They are not a whit less ingenious, not a whit less courageous, not a whit less determined. When practice has made them perfect they too will play the game just as well as their European cousins and their play will count for more because of the vast economic resources and surpluses which they possess.

American statesmen in the field of international diplomacy are like babies, taking their first few steps. Later the steps come easier and easier, until a child, who but a few months ago could not walk, has learned to romp and sport about. The masters of the United States are untrained in the arts of international intrigue. They showed their inferiority in the most painful way during the negotiations over the Paris Treaty. They are as yet unschooled in international trade, banking and finance. They are also inexperienced in war, yet, having only raw troops, and little or no equipment, within two years they made a notable showing on the battlefields of Europe. Now they are busy learning their financial lessons with an equal facility. A generation of contact with world politics will bring to the fore diplomats capable of meeting Europe's best on their own ground. What Europe has learned, America can learn; what Europe has practiced, America can practice, and in the end she may excel her teachers.

To-day economic forces are driving relentlessly. Surplus is acc.u.mulating in a geometric ratio--surplus piling on surplus. This surplus must be disposed of. While the remainder of the world--except j.a.pan--is staggering under intolerable burdens of debt and disorganization, the United States emerges almost unscathed from the war, and prepares in dead earnest to enter the international struggle,--to play at the master game of "eat or be eaten."

Pride, ambition and love of gain and of power are pulling the American plutocrats forward. The world seems to be within their grasp. If they will reach out their hands they may possess it! They have a.s.sumed a great responsibility. As good Americans worthy of the tradition of their ancestors, they must see this thing through to the end! They must win, or die in the attempt; and it is in this spirit that they are going forward.

The American capitalists do not want war with Great Britain or with any other country. They are not seeking war. They will regret war when it comes.

War is expensive, troublesome and dangerous. The experiences of Europe in the War of 1914 have taught some lessons. The leaders and thinkers among the masters of America have visited Europe. They have seen the old inst.i.tutions destroyed, the old customs uprooted, the old faiths overturned. They have seen the economic order in which they were vitally concerned hurled to the earth and shattered. They have seen the red flag of revolution wave where they had expected nothing but the banner of victory. They have seen whole populations, weary of the old order, throw it aside with an impatient gesture and bring a new order into being.

They have good reasons to understand and fear the disturbing influences of war. They have felt them even in the United States--three thousand miles away from the European conflict. How much more pressing might this unrest be if the United States had fought all through the war, instead of coming in when it was practically at an end!

Then there is always the danger of losing the war--and such a loss would mean for the United States what it has meant for Germany--economic slavery.

Presented with an opportunity to choose between the hazards of war and the certainties of peace most of the capitalist interests in the United States would without question choose peace. There are exceptions. The manufacturers of munitions and of some of the implements and supplies that are needed only for war purposes, undoubtedly have more to gain through war than through peace, but they are only a small element in a capitalist world which has more to gain through peace than through war.

But the capitalists cannot choose. They are embedded in an economic system which has driven them--whether they liked it or not--along a path of imperialism. Once having entered upon this path, they are compelled to follow it into the sodden mire of international strife.

6. _The Imperial Task_

The American ruling cla.s.s--the plutocracy--must plan to dominate the earth; to exploit it, to exact tribute from it. Rome did as much for the basin of the Mediterranean. Great Britain has done it for Africa and Australia, for half of Asia, for four million square miles in North America. If the people of one small island, poorly equipped with resources, can achieve such a result, what may not the people of the United States hope to accomplish?

That is the imperial task.

1. American economic life must be unified. Already much of this work has been done.

2. The agencies for shaping public opinion must be secured. Little has been left for accomplishment in this direction.

3. A martial, confident, restless, ambitious spirit must be generated among the people. Such a result is being achieved by the combination of economic and social forces that inhere in the present social system.

4. The ruling cla.s.s must be schooled in the art of rulers.h.i.+p. The next two generations will accomplish that result.

The American plutocracy must carry on. It must consolidate its gains and move forward to greater achievements, with the goal clearly in mind and the necessities of imperial power thoroughly mastered and understood.

XVII. THE NEW IMPERIAL ALIGNMENT

1. _A Survey of the Evidence_

Through the centuries empires have come and gone. In each age some nation or people has emerged--stronger, better organized, more aggressive, more powerful than its neighbors--and has conquered territory, subjugated populations, and through its ruling cla.s.s has exploited the workers at home and abroad.

Europe has been for a thousand years the center of the imperial struggle,--the struggle which called into being the militarism so hated by the European peoples. It was from that struggle that millions fled to America, where they hoped for liberty and peace.

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Great Britain to a position of world authority. During the nineteenth century she held her place against all rivals. With the a.s.sistance of Prussia, she overthrew Napoleon at Waterloo. In the Crimean War and the Russo-j.a.panese War she halted the power of the Czar. Half a century after Waterloo Germany, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Prussia won the Franco-Prussian War, and by that act became the leading rival of the British Empire. Following the war, which gave Germany control of the important resources included in Alsace and Lorraine, there was a steady increase in her industrial efficiency; the success of her trade was as p.r.o.nounced as the success of her industries, and by 1913 the Germans had a merchant fleet and a navy second only to those of Great Britain.

Germany's economic successes, and her threat to build a railroad from Berlin to Bagdad and tap the riches of the East, led the British to form alliances with their traditional enemies--the French and the Russians.

Russia, after the breakdown of Czarism in 1917, dropped out of the Entente, and the United States took her place among the Allies of the British Empire. During the struggle France was reduced to a mere sh.e.l.l of her former power. The War of 1914 bled her white, loaded her with debt, disorganized her industries, demoralized her finances, and although it restored to her important mineral resources, it left her too weak and broken to take real advantage of them.

The War of 1914 decided the right of Great Britain to rule the Near East as well as Southern Asia and the strategic points of Africa. In the stripping of the vanquished and in the division of the spoils of war the British lion proved to be the lion indeed. But the same forces that gave the British the run of the Old World called into existence a rival in the New.

People from Britain, Germany and the other countries of Northern Europe, speaking the English language and fired with the conquering spirit of the motherland, had been, for three centuries, taming the wilderness of North America. They had found the task immense, but the rewards equally great. When the forces of nature were once brought into subjection, and the wilderness was inventoried, it proved to contain exactly those stores that are needed for the success of modern civilization. With the Indians brushed aside, and the Southwest conquered from Mexico, the new ruling cla.s.s of successful business men established itself, and the matter of safeguarding property rights, of building industrial empires and of laying up vast stores of capital and surplus followed as a matter of course.

Europe, busy with her own affairs, paid little heed to the New World, except to send to it some of her most rugged stock and much of her surplus wealth. The New World, left to itself, pursued its way--in isolation, and with an intensity proportioned to the size of the task in hand and the richness of the reward.

The Spanish War in 1898 and the performance of the Canadians in the Boer War of 1899 astounded the world, but it was the War of 1914 that really waked the Europeans to the possibilities of the Western peoples. The Canadians proved their worth to the British armies. The Americans showed that they could produce prodigious amounts of the necessaries of war, and when they did go in, they inaugurated a s.h.i.+pping program, raised and dispatched troops, furnished supplies and provided funds to an extent which, up to that time, was considered impossible. The years from 1914 to 1918 established the fact that there was, in the West, a colossus of economic power.

2. _The New International Line-Up_

There are four major factors in the new international line-up. The first is Russia; the second is the j.a.panese Empire; the third is the British Empire and the fourth is the American Empire. Italy has neither the resources, the wealth nor the population necessary to make her a factor of large importance in the near future. France is too weak economically, too overloaded with debt and too depleted in population to play a leading role in world affairs.