If we could confidently predict the industrialization of the backward countries, we should be able to foresee an end of this one most fruitful of all sources of international strife. But China will not be industrialized for a generation, at least; and many generations must elapse before the tropics are concession proof. Accordingly the one hope for universal peace would appear to lie in the possibility of divorcing, in the popular consciousness, the concessionary interest from the national interest.
For the present war will settle nothing. When it is over, the skeleton titles thrown about the undeveloped lands may have undergone change; but underneath the new order, the struggle of exploitative capital will emerge as before. Diplomatic squabbles will again arise; popular envy will be wrought upon; international hostility will be fomented; military and naval rivalry will again crush out progress. The minor interest will once more drag the major interest to ruin.
There will, however, be in the situation one element new, at any rate, to us. In a generation we shall not be, as now, a nation with almost all its capital secure within its own boundaries. Our strong men of speculative finance will be established in the undeveloped countries; concessions will figure conspicuously among the items of our national wealth. The foreign contingent of our capital will join battle with that of the group of nations destined to fare best in the present struggle: if Germany and Austria, in South America; if Russia and Japan, in the Orient. And who shall say that our country may not be a protagonist in the next great war? One half of one per cent of our capital just failed of forcing us to subjugate Mexico.
The concession and the closed trade are the fault lines in the crust of civilization. Solve the problems of the concession and the closed trade, the earth hunger will have lost its strongest stimulus, and peace, when restored, may abide throughout the world.
THE WAR
BY A MAN IN THE STREET
That a kindly old man having his nature temporarily reversed by a passion for revenge for the murder of two relatives, should have the power to waste a large portion of the lives and treasure of the civilized world, is so counter to everything that civilized men ordinarily consider reasonable, that it is perhaps the sharpest evidence yet given of the tyranny of the past over the present.
Perhaps the strangest thing about such a circumstance is that, while it is counter to the deliberate reason of nearly all sane and civilized men, millions of sane and civilized men are contributing to its occurrence, not only with devoted self-sacrifice, but with enthusiasm.
The conflict between these two utterly opposing conditions is, in the last analysis, simply the conflict between the jungle and the railroad, between the lion and the savage, between the savage and the civilized man.