This book is made up of the articles which were published in Everybody’s Magazine, and which created such a profound impression by their calm, relentless exposure of the most cruel and most lawless and most despotic Trust on earth. Not even the Standard Oil Company grinds the common people as the Beef Trust does, for the latter deals with food products which are indispensable to life, and the Beef Trust can and does say to the people, “Pay my price or die.”
The book treats of the might of this monopoly; of the great yellow car, the bandit of commerce; of the manner in which the Trust intimidates the railroads; of the manner in which the Federal Government white-washed the Trust; of the union between rotten business and rotten politics.
It is a book that all should study.
American Diplomacy. By John Bassett Moore. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York City.
My own impression has been that “American Diplomacy” has never amounted to much, and I cannot say that Dr. Moore’s book has convinced me to the contrary.
The only apparent triumph of American Diplomacy was the securing of French aid in the Revolutionary War; and as to that most students will agree that “diplomacy” had nothing to do with it. France saw an opportunity to strike at her hereditary foe, Great Britain, and she sent an emissary to the American Congress to drop certain hints which led to the sending of Dean, Lee and Franklin to Paris. Where France was already so eager, “diplomacy” could claim no triumph.
It is to be regretted that Dr. Moore fails to mention John Laurens in connection with French aid. The fact is that Washington and Congress became dissatisfied with Franklin, and that John Laurens was despatched to France to hurry matters up. He did so. He got the money with which Washington made the decisive Yorktown Campaign, and brought it home with him. Surely Dr. Moore ought to have mentioned the name of John Laurens.
In the famous Jay treaty, “American Diplomacy” made a craven surrender to Great Britain, and in the Treaty of Ghent we certainly won no laurels. Andrew Jackson and his Southern volunteers threw the only crumb of comfort which the situation could boast when they shot the life out of Wellington’s veterans at New Orleans.
In the various negotiations concerning the Northwestern boundary, “American Diplomacy” has yielded up an Empire to British bluff and shrewdness. During the Civil War, “American Diplomacy” ate humble pie with a vengeance more than once; and even in the Venezuelan affair when Cleveland’s attitude seemed so heroic, England, it would appear, packed the arbitration board and got pretty much everything that she wanted.
In the last tilt between us and the mother country, touching the Canadian boundary, we were assured that the arbitration was a mere matter of form, and that Great Britain could not possibly get anything at all. Yet when the award was made, it developed that Great Britain had got slices of stuff all along the line—the land line and the water line.