American World Policies. Walter Edward Weyl

24 For all of these twenty millions no sufficient outlet can be found either in old or in new lands. The problem, therefore, is not to find homes for them abroad but to secure their existence at home. And this existence can only be secured by raising the necessary food in distant agricultural countries and by turning over a large part of western Europe to manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Colonisation, imperialism, the opening up of new agricultural countries, is therefore the other side of industrialism.

      The present revolution in the world to-day is thus in a real sense a sequel to the industrial revolution, which gave birth to our modern industry. That imposing industry depends upon non-industrial populations, who produce food, cotton, wood and copper, and exchange them for manufactured goods. Since the people who fashion and transport products must be fed by those who raise them, agricultural production must be stimulated at home and abroad. The nation must expand economically. This expansion, which is broader than what is usually called imperialism, is not a merely political process. It takes small account of national boundaries, but develops farming wherever possible.

      The movement is vast and intricate: Commerce between industry and agriculture is carried to the outermost parts of the earth; Africa is divided up, colonies, dependencies and protectorates are acquired; agriculture is promoted in politically independent countries, and an internal colonisation, a colonisation within one's own country, occurs simultaneously. In Australia, the Canadian West, in Argentine, in Siberia settlers lay virgin fields under the plough, and the new lands are bound commercially to the great complex of Western industrial nations.

      They are also bound psychologically. As the machine which conquered the nation now conquers the world, so the spirit of Manchester and London and of Pittsburgh and New York rules ancient peoples, breaking up their rigid civilisations, as it rules naked savages in the Congo forests. It is a materialistic, rationalistic, machine-worshipping spirit. The unconscious Christian missionaries to China, who teach the natives not to smoke opium and not to bind the feet of their women, are unwittingly introducing conceptions of life, as hostile to traditional Christianity as to Confucianism or Buddhism. They are teaching the gospel of steam, the eternal verities of mechanics, and the true doctrine of pounds, shillings and pence. Feudalism, conservatism, family piety, are dissolved; and, as the conquering mobile civilisations impinge upon quiescent peoples, new ambitions and desires are created among populations hitherto content to live as their forefathers lived. These desires are the inlet of the restless discontent which we call European civilisation. When the ancient peoples, civilised or not, desire guns, whiskey, cotton goods, watches and lamps, their dependence upon Western civilisation is assured. Bound to the industrial nations, they toil in mines or on tropical plantations that they may buy the goods they have learned to want, and that Europe may live.

      In this cosmopolitan division of labour, which destroys the old economic self-sufficiency of nations, England took the lead. A hundred years ago, when the British agriculturist sold his produce to the British manufacturer in return for finished wares, and foreign commerce was insignificant, the population was limited by the food it could produce. Every increase in the number of Englishmen meant recourse to less fertile fields, an increase in rents, a lowering of wages and a resultant pauperism. The hideous distress during the Napoleonic Wars and after was largely due to an excessive population striving to live upon narrow agricultural resources.

      The alternative presented was to stop bearing children or find food abroad; stagnation or industrialism. If England (with Wales) could in 1821 barely support twelve millions, how could she maintain thirty-six millions in 1911? Only by going over to free trade, by raising her food and raw materials in countries where land was cheap, and employing her people in converting these into finished products. To-day three live in England better than one lived before; on the other hand, a large part of the food supply is raised abroad.