[[6]] This is the real but not the avowed policy of a large section of the workers, especially of trade unionists, in the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
[[7]] French Yellow Book, No. 5. The document, according to the German commentators is falsely dated.
[[8]] French Yellow Book, No. 1. Annexe I.
CHAPTER XII
THE AMERICAN DECISION
We have seen how in Europe the outward expansion, which leads to international friction and war, has been due to deep-lying economic motives acting on ordinarily peace-loving populations. We have seen how national interest, blended with class interest, has distorted this expansion and has turned a wholesome process of world-development into a reckless scramble for territory and a perpetually latent warfare. Lastly we have seen how in all countries broad sections of the population have been sickened by the stupid brutality and imminent peril of this unenlightened nationalic competition and have groped for some plan by which commerce might expand and industry grow without the nations going to war.
Such a plan must involve a basis of agreement, if not a community of interest, among nations requiring economic security and industrial growth. The choice does not lie between national expansion and contraction but between an expansion which ranges the nations in hostile camps and one which affords more equal opportunities of development to all competing powers. For each nation it is a choice between a headlong national aggrandisement, which takes no account of the needs and ambitions of other powers and the development of an economic world system, in which the industrial growth of one nation does not mean the stagnation or destruction of its neighbours.
Like the nations of Europe, the United States is faced with the necessity of making this decision. The problem presents itself less clearly to us, since in the past we have largely expanded within; we have been able to grow by a more intensive utilisation of what was already conceded to us instead of spreading out into regions where international competition was intense. Those classes which in other countries are strongly driven by economic interest towards imperialism were in America otherwise occupied. But to-day we are beginning to overflow our boundaries, and we tend already to do instinctively what in the future we may do of set purpose. The men who wish to use army and navy to obtain American concessions in Mexico, South America and China are not distantly related to the imperialists of Germany, who believed that Kiau-chau was a fair exchange for two dead missionaries, or to those of Great Britain and France who drove their nations into the Boer War and the Morocco imbroglio. Our anti-imperialists also are animated by ideals similar to those of European anti-imperialists.