American World Policies Part 5

[1] "Letters from a Chinese Official. Being an Eastern View of Western Civilisation." New York (McClure, Phillips & Co.), 1903, p. 13.

[2] See "Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften," II, pp. 992, 993, Third edition, Jena, 1909-1911. Western Europe here includes all of Europe except Russia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkan States and Turkey.

[3] The absolute increase in the population of western Europe is itself increasing. In the decade 1800-1810, the increase was 6.3 millions; in the nine succeeding decades it was 7.8; 13.5; 11.3; 9.6; 9.7; 11.5; 14.1; 14.5 and 19.0 millions. In the fifty years ending 1850 the population increased 48.6 millions; in the fifty years ending 1900, 68.7 millions.

[4] Not all foreign investment of capital results or is intended to result in stimulating agriculture and other extractive industries.

Much of it is spent unproductively on guns, ships and royal and presidential luxuries, and much in stimulating manufacturing in agricultural nations, thus narrowing instead of widening the agricultural base of the capital-exporting countries.

[5] See Hobson, "Export of Capital."

[6] Moreover this investment, until the outbreak of the war, was rapidly increasing, amounting to no less than $1,500,000,000 a year.

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CHAPTER VII

THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM

"The free West Indian negro," writes Sir Sidney Olivier, "is not only averse as a matter of dignity to conducting himself as if he were a plantation slave, and bound to work every day, but also enjoys the fun of feeling himself a master. And so, on a big sugar estate, when expensive machinery is running, and the crop has to be worked without stoppage, or on a banana plantation, when the steamer has been telephoned at daybreak, and two or three thousand bunches have to be at the wharf by noon, the negro hands will very likely find it impossible to cut canes or fruit that morning. It isn't a strike for better conditions of labour; they may have no grievance; another day they will turn up all right: but a big concern cannot be run on that basis. That is the root of the demand for indentured labour in the West Indies."[1]

It is also the root of imperialism. For imperialism from an economic point of view is in the main a foreign political control to make the "n.i.g.g.e.rs" work. The industrial nations, desiring food, raw materials, markets and a field for investment, being thwarted by conditions in certain backward agricultural countries, seek to remedy these conditions by means of political sovereignty. It is not necessary to control well-governed countries which are peopled by economically ambitious men who will work six {86} days a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. In politically independent countries, however, and especially in the tropics, production is rendered ineffective by the disturbed political conditions, the lack of capital and capitalistic intelligence, the absence of fixed industrial habits, as well as by a general inertia and distaste for continuous labour under the hot sun.

As a result, industrial nations are deprived of the markets and food supplies, which they consider necessary to their development.[2]

No necessity of feeding Europeans appeals to the West Indian negro when he emerges from his thatched hut after a comfortable night's sleep.

Though unskilled, he is a strong and capable man, willing, when incited by friendship or grat.i.tude, to incur trouble and endure fatigue. But, as Olivier points out, "the capitalist system of industry has never disciplined him into a wage-slave," and perhaps never will. The tropical negro "has no idea of {87} any obligation to be industrious for industry's sake, no conception of any essential dignity in labour itself, no delight in gratuitous toil. Moreover, he has never been imbued with the vulgar and fallacious illusion which is so ingrained in compet.i.tive industrial societies, that service can be valued in money.... Work and money are not yet rigidly commensurable in the consciousness of the African. Half a dollar may be worth one day's work for him, a second half-dollar may be worth a second day's work, but a third half-dollar will not be worth a third day's work....

Moreover he lives in climates where toil is exacting, and rest both easy and sweet. There are few days in the year in England when it is really pleasant to loaf, and the streets of civilised cities are not tempting to rec.u.mbent meditation."[3]

It is not always necessary for a foreign power to intervene in order to disturb this "rec.u.mbent meditation." In certain tropical and sub-tropical countries there develops within the nation a group of exploiters, who control the government, such as it is, and force the natives to work. The atrocities of the Putumayo district in Brazil ill.u.s.trate the capitalistic spirit in its very worst form, as did also the forced labour on the Yucatan plantations during the Diaz regime in Mexico. To meet the economic needs of the industrial world, it makes little difference whether peons are enslaved by Mexican, American or English capitalists, so long as the output is the same. But native capitalists are often unable to secure the desired economic result because they are too ruthless and, through lack of adequate financial and military resources, cannot maintain order. Despotism tempered by revolution, oppression interrupted by savage reprisals, is not {88} an approved economic stimulus. The difficulty in Mexico to-day, as also in Venezuela and in Colombia, is the laming of industry by frequent revolutions. It is the same difficulty that was encountered in India, Persia and Morocco. The East Indian is as unflagging as the French or Italian peasant, but not until the British occupation could he secure the legal protection necessary to a higher economic development.

Peace, sanitation, industrial promotion and an economic or legal compulsion to work const.i.tute the tools of imperialism, as they are applied to agricultural countries in the tropical and sub-tropical world.

There is one outstanding difference between temperate and tropical countries, which gives to modern imperialism its essential character.

Given a low stage of civilisation, temperate lands are likely to be thinly populated, while tropical countries, however rudimentary their economic processes, may maintain large, low-grade populations. In the temperate climes, therefore, the intruder, who is more highly developed economically, soon outnumbers the natives, while in tropical countries, the white immigrant, even when he withstands the climate, is scarcely able to hold his own, and the very improvements which he introduces lead to an increase in the indigenous population. The white man either remains above and in a sense outside the population, or loses his ident.i.ty by mixing his blood with that of the natives. The result is the maintenance of a people ethnically distinct from that of the nation exercising political control.

To just what extent such control is necessary and effective const.i.tutes a difficult question. It cannot be denied that the export from many colonies is far greater than would be the case if these had remained independent. The naturally rich country of Haiti is far less valuable to the industrial nations than the poorer island of Porto {89} Rico.[4]

In many parts of the world large agricultural resources are unavailable because owned by uncivilised nations or tribes maintaining their political independence. Indeed, if an immediate increase in production and export were the only factor to be considered, a government of all tropical America by a capable industrial nation, like England or Germany, would be of distinct advantage. Other considerations, however, do enter. Even a semi-efficient nation, like Chili or Brazil, gradually establishes order, secures foreign capital, intelligence and labour, and develops its resources. As opposed to Europe, the United States stands in its Monroe Doctrine for the principle that Latin-American countries, if left independent, will in time develop, and that a slow evolution may be more advantageous to the world than a more rapid exploitation under foreign dominion.[5] Ultimately, however, the capacity of the nation to utilise its resources does const.i.tute the test which decides whether it shall retain independence or become subject to foreign domination. It is this test which is being applied to-day to Mexico and certain other Latin-American countries.[6]

As yet this imperialistic regime is in its beginning. Food and raw materials are still mainly derived from {90} independent nations and from temperate, settlement colonies, in which production is not affected by political control. The major part of the food-stuffs imported by Europe come from Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, the Argentine, the Balkans; cotton comes chiefly from the United States; wool from Australia; hides from the Argentine; copper, coal, wood, oil from countries of temperate climate. More sugar is actually produced in temperate than in tropical countries, though the export from tropical countries largely preponderates. Thus the external commerce of the specifically tropical countries subject to imperialistic rule is small compared to that of temperate countries exporting raw materials. India with its developed agricultural system exports only some $500,000,000 of food and raw materials[7] (in excess of its imports of like commodities) or about $1.55 per capita, while the per capita exportation of Roumania is over ten times as great, of the Argentine about twenty times, and of Australia forty times.[8]

If the present commerce with tropical countries were not to increase, the new tropical imperialism would have but a slender economic base, and it might well be questioned whether it was worth Europe's while to govern hundreds of millions of yellow, brown and black men in all parts of the globe. But the English colonies in America, two hundred years ago, also exported little, and a similar immensity of growth may be expected from the commerce of tropical countries. "As civilisation advances and population becomes more dense," writes Mr. Edward E.

Slosson,[9] "the inhabitants of temperate zones {91} become necessarily more dependent on the tropics. Where the sunshine falls straightest and the rain falls heaviest there the food of the future will be produced." Cacao, coffee, copra, cotton, rubber, sugar cane, bananas and other fruits are all becoming increasingly important in our consumption, and these and other raw materials are the product of a scientific exploitation of tropical regions.[10]

More and more the West-European nations, as also the United States and j.a.pan, are realising these immense potentialities. Into many tropical countries, new crops are introduced, experiment stations established, railroads built, agricultural machines imported and efforts made not only to bring new lands into cultivation but also to increase the output of older lands. The experimental spread of cotton culture is a case in point. In 1902 the British Cotton Growing a.s.sociation was created to promote the growth of cotton in British dependencies. The fibre is now being raised in Egypt, Northern Nigeria and Central Africa, while the possible output of West Africa, it is claimed, could supply all the mills of Lancashire. An ample supply of cotton for many decades to come seems reasonably a.s.sured.

The gradual filling up of the temperate zones emphasises the immense future possibilities of the tropical regions. According to Mr. Earley Vernon Wilc.o.x, the total land area of the world is about 52,500,000 square miles (of which about 29,000,000 are considered fertile) and of this total area about 15,000,000 square miles are to be found in tropical and sub-tropical regions. "In 1914, the United States imported tropical agricultural products to the value of $600,000,000,"

and the exports from Ceylon, Brazil, {92} the Dutch East Indies, Cuba, Hawaii and Egypt were enormous. "The control and proper development of the Tropics" writes Mr. Wilc.o.x, "is a problem of tremendous consequences. Year by year more tropical products become necessities in cold climates. This is apparent from the mere casual consideration of a list of the commonly imported tropical products, such as cane sugar, cocoanuts, tea, coffee, cocoa, bananas, pineapples, citrus fruits, olives, dates, figs, sisal, Manila hemp, jute, Kapok, raffia, rubber, balata, gutta-percha, chicle and other gums, cinchona, tans and dyes, rice, sago, ca.s.sava, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla and other spices, oils, such as palm, China wood, candlenut, caster, olive, cotton, lemon oil, etc."[11]

In estimating the value of the economic gains to an imperialistic nation, a moralist might be inclined to introduce other factors. The problem whether a political subjection, which is of the essence of imperialism, is or is not justified raises an uncomfortable question in ethics. However carefully native rights are safe-guarded, these subject races are forced to obey a foreign will not primarily for their own good but for that of the sovereign power. Several industrial nations, above all the United States and in second instance, England, have undoubtedly embarked upon imperialism with a truly missionary zeal for the welfare of the natives. On the other hand, the twentieth century outrages in the Congo were almost as bad as the cruelties of the Conquistadores in Hispaniola and Peru. Even in well-governed countries, like Egypt, the introduction of European legal systems has resulted in the expropriation of innumerable small property-holders, while the increase in population, due to better economic and {93} sanitary arrangements, has led to an intensification of misery. To what extent the average _fellah_ of Egypt is better off than under the reign of Mehemet Ali or of Ismail, how much the Jamaican poor are more prosperous than the poor of Haiti is at best an unpromising inquiry.

On the whole, there has doubtless been improvement. In Africa slave-catching has been abolished, and famine and pestilence circ.u.mscribed. But the gain such as it is, has been in the main incidental, the by-product of an exploitation primarily for the benefit of others.[12]

Yet however we discuss the moral question, the problem is determined by quite other considerations. So long as hundreds of millions in the industrial countries require and demand that these backward countries be utilised, humanitarian laws will not be allowed to interfere with the main economic purpose of the colonies. The imperialistic argument is always the same: the resources of the world must be unlocked. Three hundred thousand Indians must not be permitted to occupy a land capable of maintaining three hundred millions of civilised people.[13] {94} The earth and the fulness thereof belong to the inhabitants of the earth, and if the product is somewhat unevenly divided, that, the imperialists a.s.sert, is hardly to be avoided. Back of the ethical argument lie necessity and power. Let the backward countries be exploited with the utmost speed; in the centuries to come, we will go into these moral questions at our leisure.

This submission of ethical ideals to economic needs is ill.u.s.trated in the prevailing colonial labour policy, which reveals with clarity the quality and power of the economic impulse to imperialism. The great industrial nations, having reached the economic stage in which an ample labour supply can be secured without other compulsion than that of hunger, accept at home the ideal of a free labour contract, with a certain protection to the wage-earner. In their colonies, however, though they may wish to be fair to the natives, one form or another of forced labour is generally adopted. An African native, who wants little here below and can get that little easily, is compelled to neglect or surrender his diminutive banana patch or farm and come to the European's plantation or mine, or work for nothing or next to nothing on the public roads. Either this compulsion is exerted by means of a heavy hut tax, the money to pay which can be obtained only by wage-labour, or by stringent vagrancy laws, or by a refusal to allow the natives to become independent proprietors, or by outright expropriation. In some colonies penal labour contracts are enforced, and the miserable native who breaks his agreement is imprisoned or flogged. Credit bondage is also in favour, and no sooner does the native work off his original indebtedness than he finds that he is more in {95} debt than ever. Finally if the natives cannot be compelled to give enough labour, coolies are imported, chiefly from China and India, and after their period of service are expatriated.

Even a more direct pressure is not always wanting. While the imperialistic nations theoretically oppose slavery, and have rather effectively checked the horrible slave trade of the Arabs, they themselves have not always escaped the temptation to introduce slavery under new forms. At various times and in various colonies, the _corvee_ has been adopted both for public and private works, and in the Belgian Congo a thinly disguised slavery in its most atrocious form has been adopted. To justify this European slavery, which is infinitely more brutal than was the mild and customary native slavery, the same ethical and religious arguments are advanced as were utilised by the sixteenth century Spaniards in establishing their _encomiendas_. The natives, especially in Africa, are lumped together as worthless idlers, and their benevolent rulers are urged to teach these benighted creatures the Christianity of hard and continuous labour.[14] But the real motive is to secure the greatest amount of profits for the investors and of tropical produce for the European {96} populations.

Whether even from this point of view a less exacting and ruthless labour policy might not be desirable need not here be discussed. What is immediately significant is the immense power of the forces driving European nations into colonial policies, intended to increase the export of tropical products.

Because of this demand for tropical produce, tropical markets, tropical fields for investment, the vast machinery of imperialism is set in motion. Because of this demand, present and future, European armies march over deserts and jungles, and slay thousands of natives in spectacular _battues_. To satisfy the needs of European populations and adventurers, millions of brown men toil in the crowded, dirty cities of India, on sun-lit plantations in Java and Egypt, in the cotton fields of Nigeria and Togo. To grasp this imperialism, to realise the big, pulsing, dramatic movement of it, one must view the peons on hennequin plantations, the barefoot Mexican labourers in silver mines, the rack-rented fellaheen in the Nile Valley, the patient Chinese and j.a.panese toilers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. One must gain a sense of the dull ambitions and compulsions working on these men, the desire for the cheap products of Manchester and Chemnitz, the craving for liquor, the fear of starvation and of the lash. And as these coloured peoples toil, not knowing for what they toil, other men in London and Paris, in Berlin, Brussels and New York are speculating in the securities which represent their toil. They are buying "Kaffirs" as they once bought "Yankee rails." Seated in their offices, these white-faced men are irrigating deserts, building railroads through jungles and wildernesses, and secure in the faith that all men, black, yellow and brown, can be made to want things and work for things, are revolutionising countries they have never seen.

Even these organisers, these {97} seemingly omnipotent shapers of the world, are themselves only half-conscious agents of a vast economic process not solely desired by a cla.s.s or nation but dictated by a far wider necessity. It is a process varied in its many-sided appeal; a process which reveals itself in the transfusion of capitalistic ideals by means of little school-houses in the Philippines, by means of the strict and rather harsh justice in British colonies, by means of the unconscious teachings of Christian missionaries, by means of the swift decay of ancient, tenacious faiths. It is a process linking the ends of the world, uniting the statesmen and financiers of the imperialistic nation with wretches in the swarming cities of the East, with half-drunken men seeking for rubber in tangled forests, with negroes searching over great expanses of country for the ivory tusks of elephants, with the Kaffirs in the diamond mines who enter naked and depart naked, and whose bodies are examined each day to discover the diamonds which might be buried in the flesh. At one end of the line are the urbane diplomats seated about a table at some Algeciras, at the other, in the very depths of distant colonies, there is slavery, flagellation, political and intellectual corruption, missionary propaganda, and the day to day business and planning of white settlers, who are anxious to make their fortune quick and get back to "G.o.d's own country." It is a process so vast, so compelling, so interwoven with the deepest facts of our modern life that our ordinary moral judgments seem pale and unreal in contact with it. And so too with religion.

Christianity which changed in its pa.s.sage from Judea to Rome and from Rome to the Northern Barbarians takes on again a new aspect when imperialistic nations encounter the peoples they are to utilise. This imperialistic Christianity defends forced labour and slavery as an advance over a mere doing nothing. The parable of the ten {98} talents is the one Christian doctrine in which the imperialist fervently believes.

This modern imperialism, which compels subject peoples to work at extractive industries at the behest of the swarming millions of the industrial nations, which excites, stimulates, urges, pushes, forces coloured peoples to raise bananas and cotton and buy shirts, gew-gaws, and whiskey, is at bottom a movement compelled by the economic expansion and necessity of the older countries. It is an outlet for the pressure, strain and expansiveness of the growing industrial nations, an outlet for industrialism itself. It ranges the industrial nations as a whole against the backward agricultural countries, and binds them together into a forced union, in which the industrial nations guide and rule and the backward peoples are ruled.

But while the industrial nations have a common interest in imperialism, they have also separating and antagonistic interests. Though the nations would prefer to have any one of their number, England, Germany or France, rule all tropical countries rather than go without tropical colonies at all, each nation, for economic, as well as political and military reasons, desires that it, and not its neighbour and compet.i.tor, should be the supreme Colonial Power. It is because of this fact that modern imperialism takes on the form of a bitter nationalistic compet.i.tion for colonies, and leads to diplomatic struggles and eventually to war.

[1] "White Capital and Coloured Labour," pp. 80, 81. London, 1910.

[2] The case for tropical imperialism is argued by Dr. J. C. Willis (Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Ceylon) as follows: "In the present condition of the world the temperate zones cannot get on without the products of the tropics. The latter provide many things, such as rubber, tea, coffee, cinchona, jute, cane-sugar, spices, etc., which are among the necessaries of modern civilised life. The need for these has led to the settlement of Europeans at trading stations in the tropics, at Calcutta, Malacca, Calabar and many other places. Once settled there, the insecurity of the traders and the inefficiency of the natives have led to the conquest of adjacent territories, until now most of the valuable areas in the tropics are in European or American hands." The conquering nations "work on the principle of governing the country for the benefit of the governed; but they must also so arrange matters that the tropical countries shall take their share in the progress of the world at large, and produce and export certain commodities for the benefit of that world which cannot get along properly without them. If the countries of the tropics can be made to progress so far that they shall themselves, with their own population, produce these things, so much the better; _but the things must be produced_."--"Agricultural Progress in the Tropics,"--_Science_, London, Vol. V, pp. 48, 49. (My italics.)

[3] "White Capital and Black Labour," pp. 82-83.

[4] In 1911 the exports for Haiti amounted to a little over $3 and in 1912 to a little under $7 per capita; the exports of Porto Rico (to the United States and foreign countries) amounted to almost $40 per capita.

[5] Historically, of course, this theory was not the real motive behind the Doctrine. That motive was the unwillingness of the United States to have strong, military nations in its immediate vicinity.

[6] A failure to meet the requirements of the industrial nations does not necessarily involve a complete extinction of political independence. Any measure of control, any merely reserved right, such as the United States retains in Cuba, may suffice for the purpose.

[7] "Food, drink, tobacco, raw materials and produce and articles mainly unmanufactured."

[8] Owing to differences in method of cla.s.sification, these comparisons are only approximate.

[9] The _Independent_, Oct. 11, 1915.

[10] For a brilliant statement of the growing significance of tropical products, see Benjamin Kidd, "The Control of the Tropics," New York, 1898, especially Part I.

[11] "Tropical Agriculture," New York and London, 1916, p. 33.

[12] The case is a.n.a.logous to that of the operation of cotton mills in the South. Despite low wages and brutal exploitation of children, the introduction of these mills has automatically raised the standard of living, but the goal desired was not this but the quickest possible making of profits.

[13] "No false philanthropy or race-theory," writes Prof. Paul Rohrbach, one of the more humane of the German imperialists, "can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs or their primitive cousins on the sh.o.r.es of Lakes Kiwu or Victoria is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations, or the white races as a whole.

Should the German people renounce the chance of growing stronger and more serviceable, and of securing elbow room for their sons and daughters, because fifty or three hundred years ago some tribe of negroes exterminated its predecessors or expelled them or sold them into slavery, and has since lived its useless existence on a strip of land where ten thousand German families may have a flourishing existence, and thus strengthen the very sap and force of our people?"--Rohrbach, "German World Policies" ("Der deutsche Gedanke in der Welt.") Translated by Edmund von Mach. New York (Macmillan), 1915 (pp. 141-2.)

[14] Prof. Paul S. Reinsch, from whose admirable books I have drawn extensively in this description of colonial labour, rescues from undeserved oblivion an article by the Rev. C. Usher Wilson on "The Native Question and Irrigation in South Africa," published in the _Fortnightly_ for August, 1903. "A careful study of educated natives,"

writes this pious gentleman, "has almost persuaded me that secular education is not a progressive factor in social evolution. The salvation of a primitive people depends upon the force of Christianity alone, special attention being paid to its all-important rule 'six days shalt thou labour.' ... In the education of the world it has ever been true that slavery has been a necessary step in the social progress of primitive peoples."--Reinsch, "Colonial Administration," New York, 1912, p. 383.