The United States now forms a “gigantic and growing empire. She occupies a position of extraordinary strength. Favoured alike by geographical position, by deposits of minerals, by climate, and by the character of her population, she has little to fear either in peace or war, from rivals, provided the friction created by the movement of the masses with which she has to deal does not neutralise her energy.”...
“The alternative presented is plain. We may cherish ideals and risk substantial benefits to realise them. Such is the emotional instinct. Or we may regard our government dispassionately, as we would any other matter of business.... The United States has become the heart of the economic system of the age, and she must maintain her supremacy by wit and force, or share the fate of the discarded. What that fate is the following pages tell.... With conservative populations slaughter is nature’s remedy.”
Never in my life shall I forget the hours in which I wrestled with these problems—the weeks and the months of perplexity and despair. It happened long before I ever heard of Mr. Adams—for of course these thoughts of his are the thoughts of the time, there is a whole literature of them, from Kipling, Roosevelt, and the Kaiser down. And to look back over the weary wastes of history—the blind, hideous nightmare of blood and tears—and then to look forward, and in all the future see nothing else! To see never any rest for agonised humanity, only kill or be killed for ages upon ages! To see this newest and noblest effort of man after freedom and peace—the American Republic—turned into an engine of slaughter and oppression! To be shown by cold, scientific formulas that my reverence for the traditions of Lincoln was merely an “emotional impulse,” and that the end of it could only be that my country would share “the fate of the discarded!” I could not believe it—I cried out in the night-time for deliverance from it.
[[1]]There is a certain relentlessness about Mr. Adams, which fills the reader with rebellion, and makes him think. The average imperialist carefully avoids doing this; he veils his doctrines with moral phrases, with the decent pretence of “destiny” at the very least. But Mr. Adams dances a very war-dance upon the thing called “moral sense”—never before was it made to seem such an impertinent superfluity.
[1]. Portions of the following argument were published as an article in the North American Review.
Have you, the reader, never had one smallest doubt? Does it not, for instance, seem strange to you now, when you think of it, that this mighty people cannot stay quietly at home and live their own life and mind their own affairs? How does it happen that our existence as a nation depends upon expansion? Is it that our population is growing so fast? But here is our Imperialist President lamenting that our population is not growing fast enough! And so we have to fight to find room for our children; and we have to have more children in order that we may be able to fight! We deplore race suicide, and we give as our reason that it prevents race-murder!
Picture to yourself half a dozen men on an island. If the island be fertile they can get along without any foreign trade, can they not? And then why cannot a nation do it? According to Mulhall, in 1894 two millions of our agricultural labourers were raising food for foreign countries. And all our imports are luxuries, save a few things such as tea and coffee and some medicines! And still our existence as a nation depends upon foreign trade—trade with Filipinos and Chinamen, with Hottentots and Esquimaux! Why?
Can you, the reader, tell me? We manufacture more than we can use, you say. Unless we can sell the balance to the Chinamen some of our factories must close down, and then some of our people would starve. But why, I ask, cannot our own starving people have the things that go abroad—some of all that food that goes abroad, for instance? Why is it that the Chinamen come first and our own people afterwards? Until we have made some things for the Chinamen, you explain, we have no money to buy anything ourselves. And so always the Chinamen first. It seems such a strange, upside-down arrangement—does it not seem so to you? For, look you, the people of England are in the same fix, and the people of Germany are in the same fix—the people of all the competing nations are in the same fix! They actually have to go to war to kill each other, in order to get a chance to sell something to the Chinamen, so that they can get money to buy some things for themselves! They were actually doing that in Manchuria for eighteen months! More amazing yet, they had to go and murder some of the Chinamen, in order to compel the rest to buy something, so that they could get money to buy something for themselves!
How long can it be possible for a human being, with a spark of either conscience or brains in him, to gaze at such a state of affairs and not know that there is something wrong about it? And how long could he gaze before the truth of it would flash over him—that the reason for it is that some private party owns all the machinery and materials of production, and will not give the people anything, until they have first made something that can be sold! That all the world lies at the mercy of those who own the materials and machinery, and who leave men to starve when they cannot make profits! And that this is why we Americans cannot stay at home and be happy, but are forced to go trading with Filipinos and Chinamen, Hottentots and Esquimaux, and competing for “empire” with our brothers in England and Germany and Japan!
If the reader be an average American, these thoughts will be new to him. He has been brought up on a diet of misunderstood Malthusianism. He is told that life has always been a struggle for existence and always will be; that there is not food enough to go round, and that therefore, every now and then, the surplus population has to be cut down by famine and war. It is to be pointed out concerning the doctrine that, while he swears allegiance to it, he doesn’t like to think about it, and when it comes to the practical test he shows that he does not really believe it. Whenever famine comes, he subscribes to a grain-fund, and does his best to defeat nature; when war comes, he gets up a Red Cross Society for the same purpose. And yet he still continues to swear by this wiping out of the nations, and any discussion about abolishing poverty he waves aside as Utopian.