XIII

THE PROPOSED DUAL ORGANIZATION OF

MANKIND1

[ 1896]

RODBERTUS turned aside from his studies of taxa

tion in the Roman Empire, which had shown him the Roman city exhausting and consuming the rest of the Roman world, to express the opinion that the history of the last three hundred years is a story of the exploitation of the outlying continents by the old centers of civilization. This was an attempt to describe summarily the significance for the human race of the opening up of new regions by exploration and colonization. The period during which the influences of the new extension of civilized settlements has been at work is so short that it is impossible to define with confidence its ultimate effects on the relation of the parts of the race to each other and on the fortunes of the race as a whole. Recent events, however, have forced this subject upon our attention, for the "Monroe doctrine," as it has been recently affirmed and construed, would be nothing less than a doctrine and policy which some people are disposed to force upon the new organization of the inhabitants of the globe produced by the discovery and settlement of the outlying continents. If anybody claims to be able now to take control of this most portentous evolution in the life of the human race, and to dictate the course which it is to take, it behooves us all to verify the doctrine and to test the programme of policy proposed.

1 Reprinted from Appleton's Popular Science Monthly. Copyright, 1896, by D. Appleton and Company.

The era of geographical discovery and adventure passes for an era of glorious achievement by men; yet to what end did they care to know and reach the outlying parts of the earth? One motive which led them was the gain of commerce. The products of the Indies could be obtained in no other way, and the trade for them was as old as civilization. The other great motive was to obtain new supplies of gold and silver, under an exaggerated and fallacious notion of the desirableness of those forms of wealth. Starting from these motives the movement has run its own course of commerce, colonization, war, missionary enterprise, economic expansion, and social evolution for three centuries. The discovery, colonization, and exploitation of the outlying continents have been the most important elements in modern history. We Americans live in one of the great commonwealths which have been created by it. From our local and later, but comparatively old center of civilization, we are hard at work occupying and subduing one of these outlying continents; for in our own history we have been, first, one of the outlying communities which were being exploited, and then ourselves an old civilization exploiting outlying regions.

The process of extension from Europe has gone on with the majesty and necessity of a process of nature. Nothing in human history can compare with it as an unfolding of the drama of human life on earth under the aspects of growth, reaction, destruction, new development, and higher integration. The record shows that the judgments of statesmen and philosophers about this process from its beginning have been a series of errors, and that the policies by which they have sought to control and direct it have only crippled it and interrupted it by war, revolt, and dissension. At the present time the process is going

on under a wrangle of discordant ethical judgments about its nature and the rights of the parties in it. We are rebuked for the wrongs of the aborigines, the vices of civilization, the greed of traders, the mistakes of missionaries, land-grabbing, etc., yet we Americans and others are living to-day in the enjoyment of the fruits of these wrongs perpetrated a few years ago. The fact is, as the history clearly shows, that the extension of the higher civilization over the globe is a natural process in which we are all swept along in spite of our ethical judgments. Those men, civilized or uncivilized, who cannot or will not come into the process will be crushed under it. It is as impossible that the present and future exploitation of Africa should not go on as it is that the present inhabitants of Manhattan Island should return to Europe and let the red man come back to his rights again. The scope for reason and conscience in the matter lies in taking warning from the statesmen and philosophers who have been over-hasty in the past with their doctrines and policies of how the process must go on.

Looking at the movement of men from Europe to the outlying continents as a phenomenon in the development of private interests and welfare, it appears at once that the man who went out as a fortune-hunter and he who went out as a colonist are on a very different footing. The former might be said to aim at selfishly exploiting the outlying country because he hoped, after a few years, to return to Europe and there enjoy his gains. The same could not be said of the colonist, for he cast in his lot with the new country, hoping there to establish a new home for his descendants and to build up a new commonwealth.

If the same movement is regarded from the standpoint of the duties and interests of European states, it is evident

that both the fortune-hunter and the colonist needed, at first, the support and protection of the state from which they went forth. The whole movement of discovery and settlement appears, in this point of view, as a manifestation of growing social power in western Europe, and the nations there are seen to have made, in the first instance, a great expenditure of energy and capital for which they never received any return. The relation was one of parenthood, and therefore one of sacrifice, on the part of the mother countries. This relation was, however, obscured by traditions and accepted notions of national aggrandizement and glory, and by notions about commerce which were accepted as axiomatic. These notions drove the great states into policies of conquest, exclusion, monopoly, and war with each other. As a consequence the whole grand movement came to be regarded by European statesmen from the standpoint of gain to European nations, and they adopted sordid measures for snatching this gain from each other. Those statesmen assumed that Europe was the head of the world, and they allotted the outlying regions among themselves with no regard for the aborigines and very little regard for the colonists. The body of relations which was established between the Old World and the New, under this theory, constituted the colonial system.

It cannot be denied that the colonial system stands in history as an attempt to exploit the outlying continents for the benefit of Europe. Thousands of lives and millions of capital were expended in the effort to perfect the system, and in that struggle to steal each other's colonies which the system caused. The logical outcome was the ambition of each competitor to win universal dominion for itself and to impose a balance-of-power policy on each of the others. The system had its doctrines

too; some old, some new: "He who holds the sea will hold the land," "Trade follows the flag." The English colonial system was far less oppressive and more enlightened than that of any other nation. It alone was founded on real colonization and aimed to create new commonwealths. It was therefore the one under which the system first broke down, for it contained a fatal inconsistency in itself. It educated the colonists to independence, and it was certain that they would go alone as soon as they were strong enough to do so, if they thought that they were being exploited in the colonial relation. To such extent as this destiny was aimed at or unconsciously brought about, the construction of modern history put forward by Rodbertus fails to be

correct.

It has become a commonplace of history that the revolt of the American colonies was a good thing for the colonies and for England. The question no longer has any other than speculative interest, and perhaps no speculation is more idle than that which deals with the possible consequences of some other course of history than that which actually took place; but if such speculation ever could be profitable, it would be upon this question: What would have been the consequences to human welfare if the English statesmen of 1775 could have risen to the nineteenth-century doctrine of colonies and if the whole English-speaking world could have remained united in sympathy and harmony? This question has so much practical value that it may help us to see the advantage there may be in a colonial relation where it still exists, and to see that there is no universal and dogmatic ground for independence which can be urged by a third party.

Independence was brought about on the Western continent; not to any important extent anywhere else. The