D. RACIAL CONFLICTS
1. Social Contacts and Race Conflict[215]
There is a conviction, widespread in America at the present time, that among the most fruitful sources of international wars are racial prejudice and national egotism. This conviction is the nerve of much present-day pacifism. It has been the inspiration of such unofficial diplomacy, for example, as that of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in its effort to bring about a better understanding between the Japanese and America. This book, The Japanese Invasion, by Jesse F. Steiner, is an attempt to study this phenomenon of race prejudice and national egotism, so far as it reveals itself in the relations of the Japanese and the Americans in this country, and to estimate the rôle it is likely to play in the future relations of the two countries.
So far as I know, an investigation of precisely this nature has not hitherto been made. One reason for this is, perhaps, that not until very recent times did the problem present itself in precisely this form. So long as the nations lived in practical isolation, carrying on their intercourse through the medium of professional diplomats, and knowing each other mainly through the products they exchanged, census reports, and the discreet observations of polite travelers, racial prejudice did not disturb international relations. With the extension of international commerce, the increase of immigration, and the interpenetration of peoples, the scene changes. The railway, the steamship, and the telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth. The nations are coming out of their isolation, and distances which separated the different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of communication.
The same human motives which have led men to spread a network of trade-communication over the whole earth in order to bring about an exchange of commodities are now bringing about a new distribution of populations. When these populations become as mobile as the commodities of commerce, there will be practically no limits—except those artificial barriers, like the customs and immigration restrictions, maintained by individual states—to a world-wide economic and personal competition. Furthermore when the natural barriers are broken down, artificial barriers will be maintained with increasing difficulty.
Some conception of the extent of the changes which are taking place in the world under the influence of these forces may be gathered from the fact that in 1870 the cost of transporting a bushel of grain in Europe was so great as to prohibit its sale beyond a radius of two hundred miles from a primary market. By 1883 the importation of grains from the virgin soil of the western prairies in the United States had brought about an agricultural crisis in every country in western Europe.
One may illustrate, but it is scarcely possible to estimate, the economic changes which have been brought about by the enormous increase in ocean transportation. In 1840 the first Cunard liner, of 740 horse-power with a speed of 8.5 knots per hour, was launched. In 1907, when the Lusitania was built, ocean-going vessels had attained a speed of 25 knots an hour and were drawn by engines of 70,000 horse-power.
It is difficult to estimate the economic changes which have been brought about by the changes in ocean transportation represented by these figures. It is still less possible to predict the political effects of the steadily increasing mobility of the peoples of the earth. At the present time this mobility has already reached a point at which it is often easier and cheaper to transport the world's population to the source of raw materials than to carry the world's manufactures to the established seats of population.
With the progressive rapidity, ease, and security of transportation, and the increase in communication, there follows an increasing detachment of the population from the soil and a concurrent concentration in great cities. These cities in time become the centers of vast numbers of uprooted individuals, casual and seasonal laborers, tenement and apartment-house dwellers, sophisticated and emancipated urbanites, who are bound together neither by local attachment nor by ties of family, clan, religion, or nationality. Under such conditions it is reasonable to expect that the same economic motive which leads every trader to sell in the highest market and to buy in the lowest will steadily increase and intensify the tendency, which has already reached enormous proportions of the population in overcrowded regions with diminished resources, to seek their fortunes, either permanently or temporarily, in the new countries of undeveloped resources.
Already the extension of commerce and the increase of immigration have brought about an international and inter-racial situation that has strained the inherited political order of the United States. It is this same expansive movement of population and of commerce, together with the racial and national rivalries that have sprung from them, which first destroyed the traditional balance of power in Europe and then broke up the scheme of international control which rested on it. Whatever may have been the immediate causes of the world-war, the more remote sources of the conflict must undoubtedly be sought in the great cosmic forces which have broken down the barriers which formerly separated the races and nationalities of the world, and forced them into new intimacies and new forms of competition, rivalry, and conflict.