America Has Resources Sufficient for the Task of
a Christian World Power
There is abundance of intellectual, moral and spiritual power available. Here are great vigorous churches with many millions of members. Without any thought of minimizing all these moral and spiritual resources, let us think of the problem first from the standpoint of the "sinews of war."
1. Size. Bigness is not always to be mistaken for greatness, yet size gives a great advantage to a powerful people. There are vast regions of the earth that will probably never be inhabited by a dense population because they are too far north. This fact puts a limit on the future population of the Russian Empire that is not true of the United States. Brazil has a territory nearly equal to the United States, but it is in the tropics, and it may be generations before the vast regions in Brazil are opened up to civilized life. China is the one formidable rival of the United States because of her size and enormous resources. It will, however, take a long time to develop her powers. The character of the territory of the United States, capable as it is of almost infinite variety of agricultural productions, in a most favorable location in the North Temperate Zone, with so little waste territory, may lay claim to favorable possibilities, equaled perhaps by no single political unit in the world except China. In short, it is not only size that counts but a combination of great extent with other favoring forces. If we add together the eighteen provinces of China proper, Japan, European Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Great Britain, they equal only about the same geographical area as the United States exclusive of Alaska and our island possessions. In the countries named the census shows a population of more than 700,000,000 people. A few illustrations may be illuminating at this point.
There are only three States west of the Mississippi as small as all New England.
California is three fourths as large as France. There are forty millions of people in France, only a little more than two and a third millions in California.
Arizona is about the same size as Italy, and New Mexico is only slightly smaller than Great Britain.
Oregon has only 672,765 population now, but if it were as densely populated as New Jersey there would be thirty-two millions of people in Oregon.
If the United States, including Alaska and the island possessions, were as densely populated as the island of Java, we would have in this country one and one-half times the present population of the entire globe, and yet the United States would not then be more densely populated than Belgium.
Taking the State of Texas as an illustration, if France were an island and Texas a sea, and the island were in the midst of the sea, the people on the island would be out of sight of land in every direction. Counting the population of the world as seventeen hundred millions, if all the millions of Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, North America, etc., were in the one State of Texas,—not a man, woman or child anywhere else in the world,—there would be only ten to the acre!
Sections of America are not capable of sustaining a large population, it is true, but on this topic we quote a third time from The United States in the Twentieth Century: