The Approaching Climax of Imperialism

And the Problem of Developing Colonies

PARKER THOMAS MOON

IF TO the list of "isms" which trip from the tongue of the intellectual today a new one has recently been added, the reason is not far to seek. Our generation has discovered, or is discovering, the most impressive achievement of the past fifty years, and the overshadowing problem of the next few decades. The discovery comes late. Such discoveries usually do. A politician is not known as a "statesman" until flowers have been strewed on his tomb, and by the same token great events pass unnoticed in the throng of daily trivialities, until embalmed in history and heaped high with learned tomes. But imperialism still walks among us, its stature unmeasured.

Saving the United States alone, all the Great Powers have boldly and frankly engaged in the epic task of carving out giant colonial empires, during the last half century, and the task is not yet done. How prevalent such imperialism was in Europe before the war, and still remains, it is difficult for Americans to appreciate. Accustomed to believe that military aggression and conquest are contrary to international ethics, we pay in gold if we desire Louisiana, or Alaska, or the Philippines, or the Virgin Islands, or a Canal Zone, and look askance at confessed lapses from such rectitude. We desire not one additional mile of territory by conquest, said President Wilson. We have no wish to dominate other peoples, declares Secretary Hughes. The Philippines "came unsought to the American people", President Coolidge writes, forgetting Dewey's part in the transaction; we are not imperialist, we fervently repeat. Certainly not, in principle.

IT IS not so with Europe, or with Europeanized Japan. One recalls from Ambassador Page's charming letters that astonished remark about the British—"I guess they really believe that the earth belongs to them." In Kipling's more celebrated phrase, the white man's burden, the burden of subduing and ruling and civilizing tinbackward peoples of Asia and Africa, has not been shirked by England, for Liberal and Conservative have vied in adding to the British Empire, since 1874, some four million square miles, besides many a "veiled protectorate" and "sphere of interest" in which British rule is not less firm for being gloved in silk. Even Ramsay Macdonald recently refused to relinquish the Sudan, despite Zaglul's petitions.

French empire-builders, chiefly since the days of Jules Ferry, have raised the republican tricolor, emblem of liberty, over the jungles of equatorial Africa, the shifting Saharan sands, the mountains of Morocco, and the rice fields of Tonking—five million square miles in all—while in the Palais Bourbon French statesmen have justified this never-ending expansion as an imperative duty, a matter of life and death. Familiar there, though strange to our ears, is the argument that France must become a great African empire, or descend into the ranks of the third-rate powers. Italians from Crispi to Mussolini have preached the same gospel, albeit they have practiced the creed with less success. Though Germany long hesitated, even the cautious Bismarck was at length swept into the maelstrom of imperialist world politics and clutched a few colonies in Africa and in the South Seas, and William II plunged still more deeply and desperately into the struggle, only to lose all.

But why go on? Add Russia, Japan, possibly Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and you have the list of imperialist nations before the war; strike out Germany, Austria, and Russia, and you have it up to date. In parentheses put the United States, as a nation which has made its debut in imperialist society, but hesitates uncertainly, with mind divided between tradition and desire, while Europeans look on with bewilderment, wondering whether "the future appetites of this gigantic community" (it is an Englishman's phrase) will yet prove irresistible. The most learned of German historians and the most astute of Italian foreign ministers have alike predicted that America will be the modern Rome, the imperial colossus of the twentieth century. Why such a fear is entertained by thoughtful Europeans, and how much or how little it is warranted, are questions that may well be left for later discussion, while we continue our general survey.

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COLDLY summarized, the net resuit of all this empire building is that a few imperialist nations now own colonies and dominate "backward countries" comprising more than half the world's habitable land, and containing more than a billion human beings, more than half of the race.

The romanticist may prefer to visualize it: British machine guns mowing down dervishes in the Sudan, German traders vending gin to Congolese negroes, squat Malays cultivating Anglo-Dutch rubber plantations, stalwart Solomon islanders converted from cannibalism to cocoanut gathering, sunburnt surveyors mapping rail routes through desert or jungle, warships bombarding villages of mud and straw, airplanes dropping bombs on Arabs, diplomats making wholesale divisions of colonial territory by drawing pencilled boundaries on secret maps. If you have a taste for them, you can find a hundred incidents to match Sir Harry Johnston's adventure in West Africa, where, coming suddenly on a negro village, he was seized by an enormous black, carried to a hut where the skulls of earlier visitors grinned an amiable welcome, and then unexpectedly treated as a friend, presented with yams and sheep and a necklace of human knuckle-bones, after he had persuaded some drunken native chieftains to put their marks on a treaty they could not read, acknowledging as their suzerain the great "Woman Chief", who was none other than Queen Victoria. Sir Harry admits that he departed hastily, happy to have increased the dimensions of the Empire rather than of the cannibals.

Dramatic imperialism there may have been, but it was not good drama. The opening scenes, already played, have been too diffuse for the public to follow. Only in the midst of the play, as the climax approaches, has the plot become clear. And the last act is still to be written and acted. By all of us.

It is reasonably clear that we are approaching some sort of climax, and that the nature of the climax will be of more than academic interest. It will affect most of us quite personally in our incomes, if in no other way; it will have a direct bearing on national security and international peace. I do not put this statement forward as idle guesswork. It is a conviction which has been expressed by statesmen ami students of world affairs in Europe and America. It is a conclusion from premises which any intelligent person may test for himself. Some of the premises are offered for consideration here. If they are strongly put, in some cases, it is to show the force of their impact on popular opinion. Let the gentle reader remain gentle to the end, being assured that the purpose is not sensationalism, but sophistication.

To begin with, there is the plain fact that most of the backward countries suitable for colonies have already been taken, and hence that there is no longer an abundance of unclaimed land to sate the appetites of rising powers. Scarcity stimulates strife. Bones become bones of contention when there are not enough to go round. And there are not enough. Great Britain has over thirteen million square miles; France has five; and several smaller nations, notably Belgium, Holland, and Portugal, have perhaps more than their share. On the other hand, Italy's portion is poor, America's small, Japan's unsatisfying, and Germany, like Old Mother Hubbard, now finds her cupboard bare. Then there are Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and others. Here is one reiison why imperialists look for more bitter strife, and why the architects of the League are strengthening it against the rising tide. And the tide will rise, unless there occurs an unexpected change of heart in Europe.

Is such a change of heart possible or probable? In Europe, anything is possible, but there are valid economic reasons for believing the change improbable. One is that we—the civilized world—are using more rubber, diamonds, hemp, tobacco, cocoa and chocolate, cocoanut oil and palm oil. . . . Now these and many other raw materials are obtained from colonies, chiefly from tropical colonies, and their use therefore enhances the interest in colonies. The next time you purchase an automobile tire, remember that you are strengthening Dutch and British imperialism in Malaysia, for there the rubber, or most of it, is grown. One might call petroleum as witness of the manner in which raw materials give concern to diplomats and cabinets, but there has been enough oil testimony. Let us take note simply of the general fact that the chief imperialist nations are showing a strong disposition to control the supplies of raw materials found in their colonies, regardless of the wants of other nations.

Less noticeable, perhaps, but not less noteworthy, is the struggle for colonial markets. This is growing keener, partly because colonial markets for European and American manufactures are growing rapidly in both absolute and relative value, and partly because there has been during the last quarter century an international epidemic of tariff discrimination. Japan, for instance, has "assimilated" Korea, or, in plain English, has undertaken to impose protective tariff duties on nonJapanese goods shipped to Korea, while exempting Japanese products. France does the same thing in her colonies, wherever she is unhampered by treaties. Italy discriminates against foreign goods in Tripoli. In the British Empire the system of "preferential" tariffs, favoring British goods, is gradually replacing free trade. Similar devices have been applied by the United States in the Philippines and Porto Rico. One can find the details in a volume issued by the Tariff Commission. Such tariff discrimination means shutting the "open door". Closed doors invite trouble. American diplomacy is now valiantly striving to hold open doors that are swinging shut, and is battering at a few closed doors, while with more self-interest than logical consistency it keeps the tariff doors closed in American possessions. Mow provocative the contention over colonial markets will prove when European industry, recovering from its recent blood-letting, ventures forth once more with lusty enterprise to find new customers, remains to be seen.

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More potent, however, than prosaic statistics of trade, in moving the imagination, is the factor of "surplus population". An industrious professor has calculated that the population of the world, having increased during the last century from seven to seventeen hundred millions, will soon reach figures which mean international war and disaster, unless the increase is checked by birth control. As a matter of fact, imperialist nations are raising the rate of increase, by promoting sanitation and medicine in their colonies. India's rapidly growing population has become of late a problem which furrows the brows of the cleverest British imperialists, for although India is overflowing, Australia, Canada, and South Africa are unwilling to be swamped by Asiatic immigration. That is but one instance. We know well enough the passion aroused by the question of Japanese exclusion. Admiral Rodgers has predicted that when the population of the United States reaches two hundred million, we too must look, as Japan does, for outlets; if we remain a "virile" nation, he concludes, we must seize by force the additional land we require. I am setting down this argument without regard to its truth or falsity, for true or false (and I think it false), it is typical of the arguments which are intensifying imperialism at present.

More to be regarded, in my opinion, is the restless stirring of the subject races. Peoples that once submitted tamely enough to imperialist domination by European powers, now submit no longer. Nationalist Turkey turns at bay against European exploitation, Egypt rebels and is quieted only by a promise of qualified independence, Persia throws off British leadingstrings, India adopts "passive resistance" and demands "swaraj", Afghanistan repudiates British over-lordship, from Morocco to the East Indies the ferment of nationalistic rebellion is at work. Our Philippine problem is only a detail of this almost universal movement. Whether imperialism can or should be maintained against this native reaction is one of the points to be decided in our generation. To maintain it will require either much brute force and bloodshed, or else the working out of more ingenious, more subtle forms of control. Perhaps the "veiled protectorates" or the "mandates" or "financial receiverships" that have in some classes replaced cruder forms of "colonies" and "protectorates" may indicate the solution. But that is a problem in itself.

Beyond the question of 'Self-government lies still another question, which we need not take too seriously now. "Apres nous ..." Briefly, it is, what will be the standing of the present Great Powers when the present "backward" peoples and colonies have learned the master-secrets of European power, namely machines and machineguns and national patriotism. They are receiving machinery from Europe and America in such quantity as to give concern, even now, to a few manufacturers and labor leaders -who fear competition with Asia's overwhelming man-power and rich resources. Machine-guns are being sold to China, placed in the hands of Indian mercenaries, forced upon FrenchAfrican conscripts. As for national patriotism, we have just seen that it is spreading like wildfire. Peoples that have learned these three secrets are no longer "backward", no longer impotent. Witness Japan. Now Japan has but fifty-seven millions of inhabitants, whereas China has three hundred and twenty-five; India has three hundred and twenty as compared with Great Britain's forty-three and France's forty-one. Will the denouement of the imperialist world drama be a tragicomic revelation of the present "Great Powers" of Europe as pygmies, dwarfed by the giants they had tutored and armed? But as I said, this prospect need not be taken too seriously.

I have not wished to emphasize the perils of future war. I might have done so. As Mr. Lippmann declared in his illuminating little book on The Stakes of Diplomacy, "Out of the clash of imperialist policies modern war arises." The warning is as true as when he penned it.

The conclusion toward which I have been driving, by perhaps a devious route, is one so simple and true and important that it seems obvious as soon as it is put in words. Axioms do. It is simply that much business enterprise, much patriotism, much altruism, much sentimentalism, much human drama, have entangled themselves in an intricate and often amusing way, to produce a phenomenon that is now being talked about as one of the newer "isms" and needs to be talked about more often and more intelligently if it is not to produce extremely undesirable results. Do not think that talk is futile. The proverbs are wrong. In democracies talk governs fate.