Uncle Sam Abroad

by Jacob Elon Conner

What then; are we about to abandon it? No, but we are about to abandon a perverted interpretation of it and that, too, not so much from choice as from necessity. We are beginning to see that a measure of prudence for a weak power is by no means equally wise when that power has grown strong. We are beginning to see, also, that a false interpretation of it has somehow become common, which would confine our activities, save in a commercial way, to our own boundaries. It somehow assumes that we are as large and influential now as we were ever intended to be; that our future development is to be altogether internal.

To admit the truth of this—to admit that there is a limit to the area of our country beyond which it is imprudent to go, to admit that our country, being a republic, cannot consistently possess or successfully administer any foreign territory, whether detached points of military and commercial importance or portions of mainland—to admit all this is to admit the inability of our government to hold its own with the best. The “government” in England is no less democratic than the “administration” in America, and yet England leads the world in colonization.

Expansion in its broadest sense is not new. It is as old, almost, as the government itself. We have merely come to the point of extending its application to other lands, as England has long been doing, and that, too, at a time when rapid transit and communication have simplified the task inconceivably. The policy of expansion was in the air in 1893—though it had not yet received a name—when the weight of public opinion demanded of our executive that the Hawaiian Islands should not be restored to an incompetent queen. Americans have not yet forgotten their chagrin, nor how European diplomats laughed at the spectacle of the “Great Republic”, wanting so much to do the thing it ought while imagining that its hands were tied by the stay-at-home tradition. This same timidity or reticence or reserve or self-distrust or self-satisfaction, call it by whichever term you choose, has already lost for us the Samoan Islands (save one), Hayti and other strategic points.

There is some gratification to be sure in being able to show the world, as we have done, an example of a country which is not grasping for territory—which can even reject a point of advantage offered by the inhabitants thereof, feeling that the sacrifice of territory is better for us than the sacrifice of the principle of self-government for them. But in neither Samoa nor Hayti has the subsequent history of those places justified our rejection of them, either for their sake or our own. Moreover as far as its influence on the world is concerned it seems to have failed of its effect, if one may judge by the accusation of avarice that assailed us at the outbreak of the Spanish war.

It took more than the Philippine question, more than the Spanish war, to inaugurate the policy of “expansion”. These merely furnished the occasion for that toward which the progress of the world was leading us. To put it in a word—we have expanded because our “splendid isolation” is gone, rather than that our isolation is gone because we have expanded; and our isolation is gone because of the progress of the world.

The great international factors of to-day, bringing the nations into common markets and common councils, pouring the commerce, news, literature, customs, life, of each into all the others, are the steamship and the cable. These have done more for America, probably, than for any other nation; for more than any other agency they have destroyed her isolation. But they have done even more than that; for they have made her virtually central.

It was customary a few years ago—is yet in some quarters—to speak of the Pacific Ocean as if it were the backyard of the globe. It was imagined by one devout geographer that the hand of an all-wise Providence could be seen in arranging it so that the most civilized countries of the earth front upon the same ocean—the Atlantic. But the improvement of the steamship is equivalent to the reduction of distance, and this added to the establishment of bases of traffic virtually narrows the Pacific down to a smaller ocean than the Atlantic used to be. Thus America, between the great manufacturing centers of Europe and the greatest of markets in Asia, with the best of pathways to each, seems destined to become the central market of the world; and with the Nicaragua canal severing the Isthmus and the cable crossing the Pacific her position will be made all the more central as well as defensible.

As a mere matter of policy, why should we not adopt expansion? Who ever knew a recluse of a nation to attain to national greatness of any kind, or to send forth leaders of men? In such a nation one inevitable result must be the provincializing and sectionalizing of men and measures, until breadth of statesmanship and catholicity of sympathy are unknown. Americans may well profit by contrasting the statesmanship of her consuls and diplomats abroad with that of certain leaders at home. The former, accustomed to view the national policy from without are practically unanimous so far as they have expressed themselves in urging that we come out of our seclusion. “Happily”, says one, “such an ideal is as impossible as it is ignoble and retrograde. Impelled by irresistible forces we are already beginning to look outward, and are preparing to take the high place among the nations to which our strength entitles us. We should be unworthy members of the stout-hearted race to which we belong if we were daunted by the dangers and burdens of the wider activities upon which we are entering”.

The matter of greatest concern in the policy of expansion is, after all, not financial or political gain, but the reflex influence upon the individual citizen, and here we can only speculate. It is alleged on the one hand that expansion offers opportunities for corruption such as we never have known in municipal misgovernment, that it will lodge power in the hands of officials at a distance from those to whom they are responsible, that our treatment of inferior races at home does not justify our undertaking the same thing abroad, and that it is downright hypocrisy for us, a democratic people, to attempt the government of any other people.

There are certain defects common to all of these objections. It should be noticed, in the first place, that they seize upon the most conspicuous features of misgovernment in America as if they were typical, and consequently the very thing to be expected in foreign service; secondly, they indicate a pessimistic distrust of men—a distrust masquerading as prudence and conservatism—which is neither justified by the sum of the facts nor is it healthful for those who urge them; thirdly, they assume the equal right of all men to govern themselves regardless of capacity.