"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

Where England is at peace with her colonies, what price does she pay? Why, she simply makes them almost absolutely independent of the home government. Except nominal allegiance to the mother country and the acceptance of a viceroy, governor-general, or representative of the throne by some title or other, these countries are almost as free of England as the United States. They have their own parliaments, elect their own officials, make their own laws, assess their own taxes, and even perpetrate huge tariff lists, under which the products of the mother country are obliged to pay handsomely for being admitted at all. The only bond between Canada or Australia and England is one of affection to the mother country. This sometimes endures to the second generation, but there is precious little of it in the third. You can easily enough find that out for yourself by going up to Canada and becoming acquainted in almost any town in the Dominion. It seems farcical, but it is nevertheless a fact, that the best English citizens in Canada are Frenchmen, descendants of the original settlers who fought England furiously and often successfully for more than a hundred years. And the only ground for the loyalty of these people is apparently that there is no other place for them to go, and no way to take with them what little they possess.

Australia is just as independent as Canada. If she should attempt to secede and declare herself as independent as she really is, England would probably send down fleets and armies, and there would be war for a long time, with the same result in the end that followed the attempt to change the opinions of the thirteen colonies who organized this nation of ours. England’s rule of the United States certainly was not severe. Now that the spirit of the Revolution has been watered out through two or three generations, it is perfectly safe to admit that England never took as much money out of this country as she put into it. So, regarded as a business enterprise, annexation or colonization did not pay here. As soon as she began to demand taxes from the colonies the revolt began. The question of her moral right is one that is not discussed now. Discussion would not do any good. But if taxes cannot be levied upon a colony or an annexed country, of what possible service is the new land to the old?

Well, what is our lesson from all this? What would be the result of our annexing either Mexico, Canada, or Cuba, for instance, to say nothing of the small republics in the Caribbean Sea and in Central America, toward which some of our demagogues have occasionally pretended to cast longing eyes, and found a few fools to encourage them in doing so? It would be utterly impossible under the spirit of our institutions for us to treat any such land as a conquered country. The Declaration of Independence would have to be completely overturned before we could consistently enter upon any such custom. The most that we could do would be to admit these countries as portions of the Union. We would scarcely pretend to obtain them by force for this purpose, but if we were to want to get them peaceably, what would be the only method? Why, by granting them equal rights with our own citizens. Successful annexation would depend upon the acquiescence of the majority of the inhabitants of the countries alluded to. These people, like people everywhere else, have leaders of their own. All leaders have aspirations and personal ambitions, and personal pockets which never are sufficiently full. We would have to provide for them first before we could be certain of the people. We would be obliged to divide each country into States bearing some proportion of population to those which we already have. We would be obliged to give them representation in both Houses of Congress, provide judicial systems for them, and in every way recognize them as our equals.

Now, the truth is, no sane American believes the people of any of those countries to be equal to those of our own. There are intelligent Mexicans and Cubans and Canadians, but we as a body have very little respect for the general run of people in those countries; no more respect than their own rulers have, and that is very little. Some exception must be made in the case of Canada, which is inhabited, so far as the whites are concerned, mainly by intelligent people. But Mexico, according to its own statesmen and according to all travellers who have been in it, is practically a semi-civilized country. The most of the inhabitants are deplorably ignorant. Freedom of ballot is an utter farce. Law is a matter of barter, and life and property, while nominally secure, are frequently threatened by uprisings which no local government has yet been able to promptly suppress, and which certainly could not be suppressed by a central government three thousand miles away with an army of the conventional size of that of the United States.

Cuba is worse than Mexico rather than better. Cuba has been in a condition of discontent and disturbance for so long that there are but few portions of the island on which life and property are safe. The majority of the voters can be purchased at any election time for a very small outlay of money or rum, and the same purchased voters could be persuaded by similar means to rise within a week against the newly elected authorities, even if all happened to be their own candidates for office. The class of representatives which Cuba would be obliged to send to Washington could not possibly be expected to have any interest in national legislation except such as pertained to their own portion of the land. They have no sympathies of any sort with any portion of the people or industries or aspirations of the United States. It would be unfair to expect it of them. By birth and tradition they are radically different from us. Their isolation from us would be none the less even were they part of our country, and the consequence would be an alien class, demanding everything and yielding nothing, exactly what would be the case were we to annex Mexico.

Canada may drift to us in time. Some statesmen on both sides of the line regard this as inevitable. Well, what must be will be. But before any such marriage of nations there ought to be a long courtship between the parties. At present there is no love whatever between them, and until there is a marked change in this respect the union would be too utterly selfish on each side to be safe for either. We want some things from Canada, it is true. We have used up most of our visible supply of standing timber, and we could find enough in Canada for a century to come to make up for all deficiencies. But what else would we get? Very little. We assume that Canada will buy a great deal from us. But it does not seem to occur to the majority of our people that Canada is not a large purchasing country. Canada has not only no rich class, as we regard the expression, but her well-to-do class is poor, and the majority of her people are not only very poor, but have very few needs and demands to be supplied even had they unlimited means. The French Canadians, who are probably the most industrious of the population, live more plainly than any American would believe until he had travelled in the country largely. They are so poor that they regard themselves in paradise financially when they can find occupation upon American fishing vessels and in American factories. The pay of factory hands in the Eastern States is very small, as the trades’ unions have informed us frequently and without any exaggeration, but it is infinitely better than anything that the young men and young women of Lower Canada could find at home. The home of the French Canadian, who seems to be entirely contented, contains so little furniture that to the poor mechanic of a Northern city it would seem very bare and empty. The farming population of English birth is better off, lives better and has broader and more expensive tastes. But it is one thing to have tastes and quite a different thing to have the means to gratify them. The means would not be any greater if those people were citizens of the United States than they are now.

One thing we would receive in bountiful measure from Canada were we to annex her, and that is debt. She is loaded with debt in proportion to the assessed value of everything within her borders about five times as heavily as the United States, and let no one imagine that the Canadian is going to be fool enough to become part of our country and pay a proportion of our debts without having her own debts paid by us. The Canadian debt and ours would have to be amalgamated, with the result that each individual taxpayer of the United States would have to take a share in paying, literally paying, for Canada.

I know that a great deal is said about the vexatious questions that would be entirely disposed of were Canada to become part of this Union. But would we really get rid of them? All of the territory to the north of us is not strictly Canadian. Some of it still belongs to England, and even if England were quite willing to be entirely rid of the Dominion, she would keep a foothold here if only for the purpose of having a source of food supply from the fisheries. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the British islands were nowhere near as populous as at present, and the sea yielded a bountiful harvest all along the British coast, England fought France savagely on the fisheries question, and America so fully sympathized with her as to assist her to the best of her ability. So, as long as England is anywhere on our border, it would be useless to imagine ourselves rid of her as a possible enemy. She could concentrate troops and munitions of war quite as easily upon any large island or point of the upper half of North America as she can in Canada. She might not be quite so near our border or have so many opportunities for crossing, but she would be far enough away for us not to be able to watch her so closely.

The only purposes of annexation, now that men are no longer stolen and killed for the nominal reason that we wish to make Christians of them, are to get something worth having for its own sake or to find a place of overflow for surplus population. None of our neighbors are rich except in debt. They have nothing we want which we cannot get cheaper by purchase than at the expense of time, money and patience that even peaceable annexation would require.

As for receptacles of overflow, we already have enough to last us a century or two. Do not take any stock in the story that there is no more government land worth having, and that there are no more chances for the poor man in the United States. I know that such stories are told frequently by those who are supposed to know most about it. The younger men of the farming communities of the West, some thousands of them, have been howling for years to be allowed to enter the so-called territory of Oklahoma. But if to each of the majority of these men were given a quarter section of land in the Garden of Paradise as it existed before the fall of Adam, they would still be looking out for some new location. There is a great floating, discontented mass of people in the new countries. The proportion is quite as great as it is in the large cities. There are many farmers in the West who have occupied half a dozen different homesteads on pre-emption claims in succession, turned up a little ground, built some sort of house which never was finished, become discouraged or disheartened or restless, sold out at a loss or abandoned their claims, put their portable property in a wagon or boat and started in search of some new country. Their impulse seems to be exactly that of the small boy who is out fishing. He always seems to think the fish will bite better a little further on, either up or down the stream, it does not matter which, and he rambles from one to the other because rambling is a great deal easier work than fishing. The unsurveyed territory of the United States is still enormous. Between the city of New York and the Ohio river there are still hundreds of thousands of acres of good land which never echoed the sound of the lumberman’s axe nor heard the ploughman’s whistle or oath.