American World Policies

by Walter E. Weyl

There is, however, a danger that these conditions may grow worse. An unrestricted growth of the population either through natural increase or immigration would tend to increase monopoly profits and reduce real wages, thus accentuating the inequality of distribution and forcing an enormous surplus capital to be devoted to foreign trade and foreign investments. On the other hand there is an opportunity to improve our conditions. There is still a wide margin for a real increase in wages, for shorter hours, better labour conditions, improved education, improved recreational facilities, and in general a deflection of a large part of the national dividend to the improvement of the conditions of life of the whole population.

For a long time Americans ignored the necessity of any such social policy. We were almost as wasteful of our human as of our physical resources. From birth to burial we regarded our men and women as human accidents, who died or lived, languished or grew great, as circumstances decreed. Though in recent decades we have approached to a keener sense of collective national responsibility, we still suffer not only from a high infantile death-rate but also from a disastrous neglect of children who survive. Our educational system is still rudimentary, conventional, and ill adapted to our economic needs. There is little industrial education, less vocational guidance, and almost no care at all for the adjustment of the educational system to the later needs of the children. Millions of children, who in the next generation are to decide questions of war or peace, are growing up, anemic, underfed, intellectually sterile, and without morale, firmness or strength. Our slums, our low wages, our evil conditions in mines and sweat-shops unite to give us the tramp, the corner loafer, the exploiter of vice, the criminal. Such conditions are in every sense dangerous to our peace as also to our well-being. They mean a low economic efficiency, a restricted consumption, a barrier to the proper capitalisation of our country. Apart from this, the corruption arising out of such conditions menaces our national character. We hear praise to-day of the iron discipline of the German army, but we hear less of the discipline of the German school, factory system, social legislation, trade-union. If millions of Americans are shiftless, shuffling, undisciplined and only vaguely and crudely patriotic, the cause is to be found in our neglect of the lessons of modern social life.

To state these conditions of human waste and exploitation is to suggest the remedies. All such remedies cost money, hundreds of millions. There is no progress without higher taxes, better spent, and we shall not advance except by the path of a vast increase in collective expenditure for common purposes. In the end, of course, such improvements will pay for themselves. If we spent fifty millions a year upon agricultural education, we could easily reimburse ourselves out of our increased production. We spend over five hundred million dollars annually upon public elementary and secondary education, a sum much greater than that spent in any other country. If, however, we could efficiently organise our school system, we could more profitably spend three times as much. There are many other chances for the ultimately profitable investment of our capital upon agencies which make for a more intelligent, active, industrious and self-disciplined population.

There is an added use to which such higher taxation may be put. By means of a larger collective expenditure, a more equal distribution of income and a wider consumption by the masses may be secured. What can be attained by industrial action, such as strikes, can be effected in even greater measure through fiscal action. Taxes, to redress inequality, should be sharply graduated. By taxes on unearned increment and monopoly profits, by the regulation of the wages, prices, dividends and profits of great corporations, we could increasingly divert large sums to wage-earners, consumers, stockholders and to the nation as a whole. By increasing the consumption both of individuals and of the national unit, such taxation would give an impetus to home industrial development. If this deflection of wealth from the rich caused a temporary lack of capital, the resulting rise in interest rates would stimulate saving and repair the evil.

Such a progress would mean not only an advance towards a fuller, freer and more active life for the population but also a diminution of the impulse to imperialistic adventure and war. An increased income for the men at the bottom creates a broader economic base, a less top-heavy structure, with smaller necessity for support from without. It increases our home market, widens the home investment field and reduces the intense sharpness of competition for the profits of the backward countries. It affords the opportunity to be disinterested in foreign policy and to work for the promotion of international peace. Equally important is its effect upon the national psychology. It gives the people a stake at home. A device, familiar to certain statesmen, is to divert the people's minds from domestic affairs by arousing animosity against the foreigner. Is it impossible to allay hatred of the foreigner by concentrating interest on home concerns?

Psychologically this process is nothing but immunisation. A disease may be resisted by the absence in the blood and tissues of substances needed by the bacteria for their growth and increase. As we may immunise the body, so we may immunise the mind of individual or nation. We protect our children from error, not by forbidding the publication of false doctrine but by creating in the child's mind a true knowledge and a faculty of criticism. Similarly to guard against the infection of the war spirit a public opinion can be created in which war bacteria will find no nutriment.

To immunise society is not, however, a mere juggler's trick; we cannot ask Washington to legislate us into immunity. What is needed is a potent social change, arousing enthusiasms and antagonisms, and involving a new attitude towards business and politics, freedom and discipline; a new efficiency; a new balance of power within society; a new attitude towards the state; a new value placed upon the life of each individual. Such a change involves a patriotism so exigent that the nation will resent poverty in Fall River or Bethlehem as it resents murder in Mexico. Many Americans would find such a revolution in our conditions and attitudes uninteresting or worse; some, with vast material interests at stake, would prefer a dozen wars. Against this indifference and opposition, the change, if it comes, must make its way.

Such a progress would not, of course, create perpetual peace within the community. We read much to-day of satiated nations, unwilling to fight for more, but considered from within, there is no satiated society. Everywhere groups fight for economic, political or social advancement. In a democratic community the mass of the people, and especially the manual workers, though in a more favourable economic situation, would still be unsatisfied. Conflict would endure. It is well that it should be so, for a society in which all were contented in a buttressed, routine life would go to war through sheer boredom.

The economic antidote to imperialism thus resolves itself into a very necessary intellectual and emotional antidote. The lure of war persists even to-day, when soldiers dig themselves into burrows and individual courage is lost in the vast magnitude of the contest. Nor can you counteract the temptation to fight (or have others fight) by preaching sermons against war, for the sermon and the bugle-call seem to appeal to different cells in the brain. All you can do is to polarise a man's thoughts and inspire him with other interests, ambitions and ideals. A full, varied, intense life is a better antidote than a mere vacuity of existence, without toil, pleasure, pain or excitement. In his search for an antidote to war, William James points out how utterly the ordinary pacifist ignores the stubborn instincts that impel men to battle. "We inherit," he says, "the war-like type.... Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thoughts of war." The men at the bottom of society, James assures us, "are as tough as nails and physically and morally almost as insensitive," and if not to these then to all "who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavours ... the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery." For the discipline of war, William James wishes to substitute another and more strenuous discipline, "a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature." "The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stokeholes, and to the frames of sky-scrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideals."[[4]]

Even in a society which would permit an industrial conscription both of rich and poor, a certain latent bellicosity, making for war, would undoubtedly persist. There seems to be an irreducible minimum of jingoism, just as whatever your precautions, you cannot quite do away with rats or noxious germs. No nation is free from this cheapest intoxicant. You may find it with the expensive American on his travels or on the cracker-barrels in the country store and you cannot help stumbling over it in the yellow journals and in many dull and respectable newspapers which do not know that they are yellow. Even the self-depreciating type of American may turn out to be a jingo if you will trouble to take off his peel.