New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 / April-September, 1915

by Various

I.

In the discussion of America's relation to the rest of the world we have always assumed almost as an axiom that America has nothing to do with Europe, is only in the faintest degree concerned with its politics and developments, that by happy circumstance of geography and history we are isolated and self-sufficing, able to look with calm detachment upon the antics of the distant Europeans. When a European landed on these shores we were pretty certain that he left Europe behind him; only quite recently, indeed, have we realized that we were affected by what he brought with him in the way of morals and traditions, and only now are we beginning dimly to realize that what goes on on the other side of the world can be any affair of ours. The famous query of a certain American statesmen, "What has America to do with abroad?" probably represented at bottom the feelings of most of us.

In so far as we established commercial relations with Europe at all, we felt and still feel probably that they were relations of hostility, that we were one commercial unit, Europe another, and that the two were in competition. In thinking thus, of course, we merely accepted the view of international politics common in Europe itself, the view, namely, that nations are necessarily trade rivals—the commercial rivalry of Britain and Germany is presumed to be one of the factors explaining the outbreak of the present war. The idea that nations do thus compete together for the world's trade is one of the axioms of all discussion in the field of international politics.

Well, both these assumptions in the form in which we make them involve very grave fallacies, the realization of which will shortly become essential to the wise direction of this country's policy. If our policy, in other words, is to be shrewd and enlightened, we must realize just how both the views of international relationship that I have indicated are wrong.

I will take first the more special one—that of the assumed necessary rivalry of nations in trade—as its clearer understanding will help in what is for us the larger problem of the general relationship of this country to other civilized powers. I will therefore try and establish first this proposition—that nations are not and can not be trade rivals in the sense usually accepted; that, in other words, there is a fundamental misconception in the prevailing picture of nations as trading units—one might as well talk of red-haired people being the trade rivals of black-haired people.

And I will then try and establish a second proposition, namely, that we are intimately concerned with the condition of Europe, and are daily becoming more so, owing to processes which have become an integral part of our fight against nature, of the feeding and clothing of the world; that we cannot much longer ignore the effects of those tendencies which bind us to our neighbors; that the elementary consideration of self-protection will sooner or later compel us to accept the facts and recognize our part and lot in the struggles of Christendom; and that if we are wise, we shall not take our part therein reluctantly, dragged at the heels of forces we cannot resist, but will do so consciously, anticipating events. In other words, we shall take advantage of such measure of detachment as we do possess, to take the lead in a saner organization of western civilization; we shall become the pivot and centre of a new world State.

There is not the faintest hope of America taking this lead unless a push or impetus is given to her action by a widespread public feeling, based on the recognition of the fallacy of the two assumptions with which I began this article. For if America really is independent of the rest of the world, little concerned with what goes on therein, if she is in a position to build a sort of Chinese wall about herself, and, secure in her own strength, to develop a civilization and future of her own, still more if the weakness and disintegration of foreign nations, however unfortunate for them, is for America an opportunity of expanding trade and opportunities, why then, of course, it would be the height of folly for the United States to incur all the risks and uncertainties of an adventure into the sea of foreign politics.

What as a matter of simple fact is the real nature of trade between nations? If we are to have any clear notion at all as to just what truth there is in the notion of the necessary commercial rivalry of States, we must have some fairly clear notion of how the commercial relationship of nations works. And that can best be illustrated by a supposititious example. At the present time we are talking, for instance, of "capturing" German or British or French trade.

Now, when we talk thus of "German" trade in the international field, what do we mean? Here is the ironmaster in Essen making locomotives for a light railway in an Argentine province, (the capital for which has been subscribed in Paris)—which has become necessary because of the export of wool to Bradford, where the trade has developed owing to sales in the United States, due to high prices produced by the destruction of sheep runs, owing to the agricultural development of the West.

But for the money found in Paris, (due, perhaps, to good crops in wine and olives, sold mainly in London and New York,) and the wool needed by the Bradford manufacturer, (who has found a market for blankets among miners in Montana, who are smelting copper for a cable to China, which is needed because the encouragement given to education by the Chinese Republic has caused Chinese newspapers to print cable news from Europe)—but for such factors as these, and a whole chain of equally interdependent ones throughout the world, the ironmaster in Essen would not have been able to sell his locomotives.

How, therefore, can you describe it as part of the trade of "Germany" which is in competition with the trade of "Britain" or "France" or "America"? But for the British, French, and American trade, it could not have existed at all. You may say that if the Essen ironmaster could have been prevented from selling his locomotives the order would have gone to an American one.

H.M. PETER I—King of Servia

WALTER H. PAGE—American Ambassador to Great Britain
—(Photo from Paul Thompson)

But this community of German workmen, called into existence by the Argentina trade, maintains by its consumption of coffee a plantation in Brazil, which buys its machinery in Chicago. The destruction, therefore, of the Essen trade, while it might have given business to the American locomotive maker, would have taken it from, say, an American agricultural implement maker. The economic interests involved sort themselves, irrespective of the national groupings. I have summarized the whole process as follows, and the need for getting some of these simple things straight is my excuse for quoting myself:

Co-operation between nations has become essential for the very life of their peoples. But that co-operation does not take place as between States at all. A trading corporation, "Britain" does not buy cotton from another corporation, "America." A manufacturer in Manchester strikes a bargain with a merchant in Louisiana in order to keep a bargain with a dyer in Germany, and three or a much larger number of parties enter into virtual, or, perhaps, actual, contract, and form a mutually dependent economic community, (numbering, it may be, with the work people in the group of industries involved, some millions of individuals)—an economic entity, so far as one can exist, which does not include all organized society.

The special interests of such a community may become hostile to those of another community, but it will almost certainly not be a "national" one, but one of a like nature, say a shipping ring or groups of international bankers or Stock Exchange speculators. The frontiers of such communities do not coincide with the areas in which operate the functions of the State.

How could a State, say Britain, act on behalf of an economic entity such as that just indicated? By pressure against America or Germany? But the community against which the British manufacturer in this case wants pressure exercised is not "America" or "Germany"—both Americans and Germans are his partners in the matter. He wants it exercised against the shipping ring or the speculators or the bankers who are in part British....

This establishes two things, therefore: The fact that the political and economic units do not coincide, and the fact which follows as a consequence—that action by political authorities designed to control economic activities which take no account of the limits of political jurisdiction is necessarily irrelevant and ineffective.—(From "Arms and Industry: A Study of the Foundations of International Polity." Page 28. Putnams: New York.)

The fallacy of the idea that the groups we call nations must be in conflict because they struggle together for bread and the means of sustenance is demonstrated immediately when we recall the simple facts of historical development. When, in the British Islands, the men of Wessex were fighting with the men of Sussex, far more frequently and bitterly than today the men of Germany fight with those of France, or either with those of Russia, the separate States which formed the island were struggling with one another for sustenance, just as the tribes which inhabited the North American Continent at the time of our arrival there were struggling with one another for the game and hunting grounds. It was in both cases ultimately a "struggle for bread."

At that time, when Britain was composed of several separate States, that struggled thus with one another for land and food, it supported with great difficulty anything between one and two million inhabitants, just as the vast spaces now occupied by the United States supported about a hundred thousand, often subject to famine, frequently suffering great shortage of food, able to secure just the barest existence of the simplest kind.

Today, although Britain supports anything from twenty to forty times, and North America something like a thousand times, as large a population in much greater comfort, with no period of famine, with the whole population living much more largely and deriving much more from the soil than did the men of the Heptarchy, or the Red Indians, the "struggle for bread" does not now take the form of struggle between groups of the population. The more they fought, the less efficiently did they support themselves; the less they fought one another, the more efficiently did they all support themselves.

This simple illustration is at least proof of this, that the struggle for material things did not involve any necessary struggle between the separate groups or States; for those material things are given in infinitely greater abundance when the States cease to struggle. Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those conflicts, that origin was not any inevitable conflict in the exploitation of the earth. If those conflicts were concerned with material things at all, they arose from a mistake about the best means of obtaining them, exploiting the earth, and ceased when those concerned realized the mistake.

Just as Britain supported its population better when Englishmen gave up fighting between themselves, so the world as a whole could support its population better if it gave up fighting.

Moreover, we have passed out of the stage when we could massacre a conquered population to make room for us. When we conquer an inferior people like the Filipinos, we don't exterminate them, we give them an added chance of life. The weakest don't go to the wall.

But at this point parenthetically I want to enter a warning. You may say, if this notion of the rivalry of nations is false, how do you account for the fact of its playing so large a part in the present war?

Well, that is easily explained—men are not guided necessarily by their interest even in their soberest moments, but by what they believe to be their interest. Men do not judge from the facts, but from what they believe to be the facts. War is the "failure of human understanding." The religious wars were due to the belief that two religions could not exist side by side. It was not true, but the false belief provoked the wars. Our notions as to the relation of political power to a nation's prosperity are just as false, and this fallacy, like the older one, plays its part in the causation of war.

Now, let us for a moment apply the very general rule thus revealed to the particular case of the United States at this present juncture.

American merchants may in certain cases, if they are shrewd and able, do a very considerably increased trade, though it is just as certain that other merchants will be losing trade, and I think there is pretty general agreement that as a matter of simple fact the losses of the war so far have for America very considerably and very obviously overbalanced the gains. The loss has been felt so tangibly by the United States Government, for instance, that a special loan had to be voted in order to stop some of the gaps. Whole States, whose interests are bound up with staples like cotton, were for a considerable time threatened with something resembling commercial paralysis.

While we may admit advances and gains in certain isolated directions, the extra burden is felt in all directions of commerce and industry. And that extra burden is visible through finance—the increased cost of money, the scarcity of capital, the lower negotiability of securities, the greater uncertainty concerning the future. It is by means of the financial reaction that America, as a whole, has felt the adverse effects of this war. There is not a considerable village, much less a considerable city, not a merchant, not a captain of industry in the United States that has not so felt it. It is plainly evident that by the progressive dearness of money, the lower standard of living that will result in Europe, the effect on immigration, and other processes which I will touch upon at greater length later, any temporary stimulus which a trade here and there may receive will be more than offset by the difficulties due to financial as apart from industrial or commercial reactions.

This war will come near to depriving America for a decade or two of its normal share of the accumulated capital of the older peoples, whether that capital be used in paying war indemnities or in paying off the cost of the war or in repairing its ravages. In all cases it will make capital much dearer, and many enterprises which with more abundant capital might have been born and might have stimulated American industry will not be born. For the best part of a generation perhaps the available capital of Europe will be used to repair the ravages of war there, to pay off the debts created by war, and to start life normally once more. We shall suffer in two ways.

In a recent report issued by the Agricultural Department at Washington is a paragraph to the effect that one of the main factors which have operated against the development of the American farm is the difficulty that the farmer has found in securing abundant capital and the high price that he has to pay for it when he can secure it. It will in the future be of still higher price, and still less abundant, because, of course, the capital of the world is a common reservoir—if it is dearer in one part, it is dearer to some extent in all parts.

So that if for many years the American farmhouse is not so well built as it might be, the farm not so well worked, rural life in America not so attractive as it might be, the farmer's wife burdened with a little more labor than she might otherwise have, and if she grows old earlier than she might otherwise, it will be in part because we are paying our share of the war indemnities and the war costs.

But this scarcity of capital operates in another way. One of the most promising fields for American enterprise is, of course, in the undeveloped lands to the south of us, but in the development of those lands we have looked and must look for the co-operation of European capital. Millions of French and British money have poured into South America, building docks and railroads and opening up the country, and that development of South America has been to our advantage because quite frequently these enterprises were under the actual management of Americans, using to the common advantage the savings of the thrifty Frenchman and the capital of the wealthy Englishman.

For, of course, as between the older and the newer worlds there has gone on this very beneficent division of labor: the Old World having developed its soil, built its cities, made its roads, has more capital available for outside employment than have the population of newer countries that have so much of this work before them. And now this possibility of fruitful co-operation is, for the time being, and it may be for many years, suspended. I say nothing of the loss of markets in the older countries which will be occasioned by sheer loss of population and the lower standard of living. That is one of the more obvious but not perhaps the most important of the ways in which the war affects us commercially.

Speaking purely in terms of commercial advantage—and these, I know, do not tell the whole story (I am not for a moment pretending they do)—the losses that we shall suffer through this war are probably very much more considerable than those we should suffer by the loss of the Philippines in the event, say, of their being seized by some hostile power; and we suffer these losses, although not a single foreign soldier lands upon our soil. It is literally and precisely true to say that there is not one person from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn that will not be affected in some degree by what is now going on in Europe. And it is at least conceivable that our children and children's children will feel its effects more deeply still.

Nor is America escaping the military any more than she has escaped the commercial and financial effects of this war. She may never be drawn into active military co-operation with other nations, but she is affected none the less. Indeed the military effects of this war are already revealing themselves in a demand for a naval programme immensely larger than any American could have anticipated a year ago, by plans for an enormously enlarged army. All this is the most natural result.

Just consider, for instance, the ultimate effect of a quite possible outcome of the present conflict—Germany victorious and the Prussian effort next directed at, say, the conquest of India. Imagine India Prussianized by Germany, so that, with the marvelous efficiency in military organization which she has shown, she is able to draw on an Asiatic population of something approaching 400,000,000.

Whether the situation then created would really constitute a menace for us or not, this much would be certain—that the more timid and timorous among us would believe it to be a menace, and it would furnish an irresistible plea for a very greatly enlarged naval and military establishment. We too, in that case would probably be led to organize our nation on the lines on which the European military nations have organized theirs, with compulsory military service, and so forth.

Indeed, even if Germany is not victorious the future contains possibilities of a like result; imagine, what is quite possible, that Russia becomes the dominant factor in Europe after this war and places herself at the head of a great Slav confederacy of 200,000,000, with her power extending incidentally to the Pacific coast of Asia, and, it may be the day after tomorrow, over 100,000,000 or 200,000,000 of Asiatics. We should thus have a militarized power of 200,000,000 or 300,000,000 or 400,000,000 souls, autocratically governed, endowed with western technical knowledge in the manipulation of the instruments of war, occupying the Pacific coast line directly facing our Pacific coast line. It is quite conceivable, therefore, that as the outcome of either of the two possible results of this war we may find ourselves embarked upon a great era of militarization.

Our impregnability does not protect us from militarism. It is quite true that this country, like Russia, cannot be permanently invaded; it is quite true that hostile navies need not necessarily be resisted by navies of our own so far as the protection of our coasts is concerned. But there is no such thing as absolute certainty in these matters. While personally I believe that no country in the world will ever challenge the United States, that the chances are a hundred to one against it, it is on just that one chance that the militarist bases his plea for armaments and secures them.

But, unfortunately, we are already committed to a good deal more than just mere defense of American territory; problems arising out of the Philippines and the Panama Canal and the Monroe Doctrine have already committed us to a measure of intervention in the political affairs of the outside world. In brief, if the other nations of the world have great armies and navies—and tomorrow those other nations will include a reorganized China as they already include a westernized Japan—if there is all that weight of military material which might be used against us, then in the absence of those other guarantees which I shall suggest, we shall be drawn into piling up a corresponding weight of material as against that of the outside world.

And, of course, just as we cannot escape the economic and the military reaction of European development, neither can we escape the moral. If European thought and morality did, by some fatality, really develop in the direction of a Nietzschean idealization of military force, we might well get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ideals, and morals.

For there is no such thing as one nation standing out and maintaining indefinitely a social spirit, an attitude toward life and society absolutely distinct and different from that of the surrounding world. The character of a society is determined by the character of its ideas, and neither tariffs nor coastal defenses are really efficient in preventing the invasion of ideas, good or bad. The difference between the kind of society which exists in Illinois today and that which existed there 500 years ago is not a difference of physical vigor or of the raw materials of nature; the Indian was as good a man physically as the modern Chicagoan, and possessed the same soil. What makes the difference between the two is accumulated knowledge, the mind. And there never was yet on this planet a change of ideas which did not sooner or later affect the whole planet.

The "nations" that inhabited this continent a couple of thousand years ago were apparently quite unconcerned with what went on in Europe or Asia, say, in the domain of mathematical and astronomical knowledge. But the ultimate effect of that knowledge on navigation and discovery was destined to affect them—and us—profoundly. But the reaction of European thought upon this continent, which originally required twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred or two thousand years to show itself, now shows itself, in the industrial and commercial field, for instance, through our banking and Stock Exchanges, in as many hours, or, for that matter, minutes.

It is difficult, of course, for us to realize the extent to which each nation owes its civilization to others, how we have all lived by taking in each other's washing. As Americans, for instance, we have to make a definite effort properly to realize that our institutions, the sanctity of our homes and all the other things upon which we pride ourselves, are the result of anything but the unaided efforts of a generation or two of Americans, perhaps owing a little to certain of the traditions that we may have taken from Britain.

One has to stop and uproot impressions that are almost instinctive, to remember that our forefathers reached these shores by virtue of knowledge which they owed to the astronomical researches of Egyptians and Chaldeans, who inspired the astronomers of Greece, who inspired those of the Renaissance in Italy, Spain, and Germany, keeping alive and developing not merely the art of measuring space and time, but also that conception of order in external nature without which the growth of organized knowledge, which we call science, enabling men to carry on their exploitation of the world, would have been impossible; that our very alphabet comes from Rome, who owed it to others; that the mathematical foundation of our modern mechanical science—without which neither Newton nor Watt nor Stevenson nor Ericson nor Faraday nor Edison could have been—is the work of Arabs, strengthened by Greeks, protected and enlarged by Italians; that our conceptions of political organization, which have so largely shaped our political science, come mainly from the Scandinavian colonists of a French province; that British intellect, to which perhaps we owe the major part of our political impulses, has been nurtured mainly by Greek philosophy; that our Anglo-Saxon law is principally Roman, and our religion almost entirely Asiatic in its origins; that for those things which we deem to be the most important in our lives, our spiritual and religious aspirations, we go to a Jewish book interpreted by a Church Roman in origin, reformed mainly by the efforts of Swiss and German theologians.

And this interaction of the respective elements of the various nations, the influence of foreigners, in other words, and of foreign ideas, is going to be far more powerful in the future than it has been in the past. Morally, as well as materially, we are a part of Europe. The influence which one group exercises on another need not operate through political means at all; indeed, the strongest influences are non-political.

American life and civilization may be transformed by European developments, though the Governments of Europe may leave us severely alone. Luther and Calvin had certainly a greater effect in England than Louis XIV. or Napoleon. Gutenberg created in Europe a revolution more powerful than all the military revolutions of the last ten centuries. Greece and Palestine did not transform the world by their political power. Yet these simple and outstanding truths are persistently ignored by our political and historical philosophers and theorists. For the most part our history is written with a more sublime disregard of the simple facts of the world than is shown perhaps in any other department of human thought and inquiry.

You may today read histories of Europe written by men of worldwide and pre-eminent reputation, professing to tell the story of the development of human society, in which whole volumes will be devoted to the effect of a particular campaign or military alliance in influencing the destinies of a people like the French or the German. But in those histories you will find no word as to the effect of such trifles as the invention of the steam engine, the coming of the railroad, the introduction of the telegraph and cheap newspapers and literature on the destiny of those people; volumes as to the influence which Britain may have had upon the history of France or Germany by the campaigns of Marlborough, but absolutely not one word as to the influence which Britain had upon the destinies of those people by the work of Watt and Stephenson.

A great historian philosopher laying it down that the "influence" of England was repelled or offset by this or that military alliance, seriously stated that "England" was losing her influence on the Continent at a time when her influence was transforming the whole lives of Continental people to a greater degree than they had been transformed since the days of the Romans.

I have gone into this at some length to show mainly two things—first, that neither morally nor materially, neither in our trade nor in our finance, nor in our industry, nor in all those intangible things that give value to life can there be such a thing as isolation from the rest of Christendom. If European civilization takes a "wrong turning"—and it has done that more than once in the past—we can by no means escape the effects of that catastrophe. We are deeply concerned, if only because we may have to defend ourselves against it and in so doing necessarily transform in some degree our society and ourselves.

And I wanted to show, secondly, that not only as a simple matter of fact as things stand are we in a very real sense dependent upon Europe, that we want European capital and European trade, and that if we are to do the best for American prosperity we must increase that dependence, but that if we are effectively to protect those things that go deeper even than trade and prosperity, we must co-operate with Europe intellectually and morally. It is not for us a question of choice. For good or evil, we are part of the world affected by what the rest of the world becomes and affected by what it does. And I want to show in my next article that only by frankly facing the fact (which we cannot deny) that we are a part of the civilized world and must play our part in it, shall we achieve real security for our material and moral possessions and do the best that we know for the general betterment of American life.