American World Policies

CHAPTER XIV

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 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 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 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 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,

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  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.

 but while incomes are also very unequal,

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  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.

 the rate of wages

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  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.

 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 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. 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 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 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 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 childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideals."

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  William James. The Moral Equivalent of War. In "Memories and Studies." New York. Longmans, Green & Co. 1912.

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,

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  Sumner (William Graham). "War and Other Essays," New Haven (Yale University Press), 1913, p. 29.

 "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 Paraguay or San Marino.

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  "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.

 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 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 a lone hand, upon our abstention from a selfish and short-sighted policy of national aggression and