Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is hard at work. Let us continue viewing that same industry of cotton-spinning. The value of the manufactured-cotton product of Austria has grown from fifteen million dollars in 1834, to thirty-five million dollars in 1860, and ninety millions in 1894. The textile manufactures of Belgium trebled themselves in three years previous to 1894; those of Germany have increased twenty-fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold in twenty years, while even such backward countries as Russia and Spain have doubled their textile industries, one in thirty, the other in twenty years. Most unexpected and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, who was once looked upon as a permanent customer, but whose home industries have been growing like a magic plant. The textile manufactures of Japan doubled in value in the three years between 1896 and 1899. From six million pounds of cotton spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one million in 1893, and to one hundred and fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years increasing twenty-four fold. The value of all her textile produce was six million dollars in 1887, and it was seventy million dollars in 1895. Therefore her imports of cotton goods from Europe fell from eight million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895.
And while this was going on in the rest of the world, in the United States the value of manufactured cotton was rising from forty-five million dollars in 1840, to two hundred and ten million dollars in 1880, to two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in 1890, and to three hundred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the factories of Massachusetts and Canada were running on half-time, and dozens not running at all; that British cotton manufacturers found that prices had decreased fifteen per cent. in as many years; that the weavers of Belgium were starving, and the country was full of riots and insurrections; and that all the nations of Europe were gathering in the Far East like vultures about a carcass—knowing that the sole condition upon which any one of them could maintain its industrial and social régime for another decade, was its ability to secure the custom of some hundreds of millions of Chinamen, who are so poor that a handful of rice and a cotton shirt are all they own in the world!
I often wonder what our college presidents and other after-dinner economists make of facts such as these. They do not discuss them in their speeches. I am acquainted with only one man among all our orthodox advisers who believes in the permanence of the competitive régime, and at the same time really understands what it is and what it implies—who cares for the truth, follows his views to their conclusions, and then speaks the conclusions. When I first became acquainted with this gentleman—intellectually acquainted, that is—it affected me painfully, and even now the sight of his book gives me internal sensations akin to those of a man in an ascending elevator which comes to a sudden halt.
The book is “The New Empire,” and the author is Mr. Brooks Adams. He writes coldly and dispassionately, and with the certainty of the man of science, whose conclusions may not be disputed. His style is characteristic; it is brief and to the point, and there are no apologies.
Mr. Adams is the apostle of competition. He explains that he is this, not from choice but from necessity. “Very probably keen competition is not a blessing. We cannot alter our environment. Nature has cast the United States into the vortex of the fiercest struggle ever known.” His theory of life Mr. Adams condenses as follows: “For the purpose of obtaining a working hypothesis it is assumed that men are evolved from their environment like other animals, and that their intellectual, moral, and social qualities may be investigated as developments from the struggle for life.... Food is the first necessity, but as most regions produce food more or less abundantly, the pinch lies not so much in the existence of the food itself as with its distribution.... To satisfy their hunger men must not only be able to defend their own, but, in case of dearth, to rob their neighbours, where they cannot buy, for the weaker must perish.... Life may be destroyed as effectually by peaceful competition as by war. A nation which is undersold may perish by famine as completely as if slaughtered by a conqueror.... For these reasons men have striven to equip themselves well for the combat, and since the end of the Stone Age no nation in the more active quarters of the globe has been able to do so without a supply of relatively cheap metal.... Thus the position of the mines has influenced the direction of travel. The centre of the mineral production is likely to be the seat of empire. I believe it is impossible to overestimate the effect upon civilisation of the variation of trade routes. According to the ancient tradition, the whole valley of the Syr-Daria was once so thickly settled that a nightingale could fly from branch to branch of different trees, and a cat walk from wall to wall and from housetop to housetop, from Kashgar to the Sea of Aral.” But the trade route across central Asia was displaced, “and so it has come to pass that Bagdad has sunk into a mass of hovels, and the valley of Syr-Daria is a wilderness. The fate of the empire of Haroun-al-Raschid exemplifies an universal law.”
“The greatest prize of modern times,” in Mr. Adams’s opinion, is northern China, and upon this the fate of empire rests. His book was published in 1901, and he considered then that the chances were all with the United States. Ten years before we had been “tottering upon the brink of ruin.... Relief came through an exertion of energy and adaptability, perhaps without a parallel.... In three years America reorganised her whole social system by a process of consolidation, the result of which has been the so-called trust. But the trust is in reality the highest type of administrative efficiency, and therefore of economy, which has as yet been attained. By means of this consolidation the American people were enabled to utilise their mines to the full.... The shock of the impact of the new power seems overwhelming.... In March, 1897, Pittsburg achieved supremacy in steel, and in an instant Europe felt herself poised above an abyss.... The Spanish Empire disintegrated, and Great Britain displayed a lassitude which has attracted the attention of the entire world.... Germany has also been perturbed.... Russia has, however, suffered most.
“The world seems agreed that the United States is likely to achieve, if indeed she has not already achieved, an economic supremacy. The vortex of the cyclone is near New York. No such activity prevails elsewhere; nowhere are undertakings so gigantic, nowhere is administration so perfect; nowhere are such masses of capital centralised in single hands. And as the United States becomes an imperial market, she stretches out along the trade routes which lead from foreign countries to her heart, as every empire has stretched out from the days of Sargon to our own. The West Indies drift toward us, the Republic of Mexico hardly longer has an independent life, and the City of Mexico is an American town. With the completion of the Panama Canal all Central America will become a part of our system. We have expanded into Asia, we have attracted the fragments of the Spanish dominions, and reaching out into China, we have checked the demands of Russia and Germany, in territory, which, until yesterday, had been supposed to be beyond our sphere. We are penetrating Europe, and Great Britain especially is assuming the position of a dependency, which must rely upon us as the base from which she draws her food in peace, and without which she could not stand in war.”
“Supposing the movement of the next fifty years only equal to that of the last,” continues our author, ... “the United States will outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined. The whole world will pay her tribute. Commerce will flow to her, both from east and west, and the order which has existed from the dawn of time will be reversed.”
There is only one peril about all this, in the opinion of Mr. Adams. “Society is now moving with intense velocity, and masses are gathering bulk with proportional rapidity. There is also some reason to surmise that the equilibrium is correspondingly delicate and unstable. If so apparently slight a cause as a fall of prices for a decade has been sufficient to propel the seat of empire across the Atlantic, an equally slight derangement of the administrative functions of the United States might force it across the Pacific. Prudence therefore would dictate the adoption of measures to minimise the likelihood of sudden shocks.... If the New Empire should develop, it must be an enormous complex mass, to be administered only by means of a cheap, elastic and simple machinery; an old and clumsy mechanism must, sooner or later, collapse, and in sinking may involve a civilisation.”
By “an old and clumsy mechanism” Mr. Adams explains elsewhere that he means our American political system. Our ancestors were opposed to much consolidation, and they formed a constitution that was practically unchangeable, because they believed they had “reached certain final truths of government.” “The language of the Declaration of Independence, in which they proclaimed one of these truths (that all men are created equal), varies little from that of a Catholic council,” says Mr. Adams. An American is apt to believe such formulas, being “dominated by tradition.” But a modern thinker views them “as having no necessary relation to the conduct of affairs in the twentieth century.” “If men are to be observed scientifically, the standard by which customs and institutions must be gauged cannot be abstract moral principles, but success.... Institutions are good when they lead to success in competition, and bad when they hinder.”