VII
In a new country of vast natural resources, especially if it is not too well governed, there is sufficient scope for both speculative enterprise and capital proper. The United States has been such a country, at least down to a very recent date. There was easy money enough for all men of shrewdness and resolution possessed of the necessary initial stake—public forests to be leveled, railways to be built or wrecked, trusts to be organized, cities to be provided with public utilities. But all this easy money now appears to be in danger of being locked up. We have a conservation movement in full swing, and a civic reform tendency that is no longer a mere cloak for the insatiable appetite of plunderers out of power. The popular attitude toward monopolistic combinations is growing ominously serious; if old and strong combinations do not dissolve in fear before it, yet those who would organize new combinations are deeply discouraged. We have an Interstate Commerce Commission with the will and the power to choke all railways when some are believed to have stealings in their gorge. Already we are beginning to hear murmurs about town, that in view of the popular hostility to wealth, it will be necessary for American capital to look to foreign investments. Not foreign investments in England and France and Germany, where government is efficient and capital proper prevails. But foreign investments in the undeveloped countries, in a Land of the Morning, “east of Suez.”
In England the domestic field for capitalistic speculation has long been restricted. For generations the British citizen has been taught to look to Asia, Africa, America, for the opportunities for sudden wealth. Germany, more recently launched upon an industrial career, might have offered many rich opportunities at home. But Germany has been well governed. The early nationalization of railways closed one lucrative field; the cities, with their excellent business governments, have taken control of their own utilities, or have driven hard bargains with private enterprise. Industrial combinations have been as numerous as with us; but they have assumed the form of the Kartell—a legally binding agreement between independent producers, fixing prices and volume of production. Such a form of organization, like our former “pools,” distributes the profits of combination fairly equitably among all the producers, and therefore has offered little opportunity for such promoter’s gains as we are familiar with in American trust finance. Some opening there was, of course, for speculative enterprise. The launching of new industrial companies, dealings in real estate, the military and naval industries, laid the basis for many astounding mushroom fortunes. But the progress of governmental effectiveness has been steadily encroaching upon these fields. The German internal situation, then, has been such as to recommend the Ausland to those who wish to risk large stakes on the chance of brilliant returns.
The progress of modern industrial society, with its parallel development in the art of government, tends to the extrusion of speculative capital, and its concentration in the tropical and subtropical belts. In the older societies the process has been in operation for a considerable time; with us it is just beginning. But in a generation, we may be sure, much of our own speculative capital, like that of the older countries, will be engaged in colonial exploitation.