were to take up the function of the other. We may not belittle the tremendous services of England in the enforcement of laws amid barbarism. We may not deny that every aggression of hers on weaker nations results in some good to the conquered, but we insist that our own function of turning masses into men, of "knowing men by name," is as noble as hers. Better for the world that the whole British Empire should be dissolved, as it must be late or soon, than that the United States should forget her own mission in a mad chase of emulation. He reads history to little purpose who finds in imperial dominion a result, a cause or even a sign of national greatness. It is not true that England's escape from political corruption is due to the growth of her imperial power. It is due to the growth of individual intelligence, the spread of the spirit of democracy. To this development Imperialism has been a hindrance only. Sooner or later Imperialism must be abandoned by England. The subject peoples must share with England the cost and the responsibility of rule else the mother country will be crushed under its burdens. Sooner or later, says a recent writer : "England must take all her colonies into political copartnership (of taxation and of responsibility) or else abandon them, or in the end be crushed by the burden of their care." We may have a navy and coaling stations to meet our commercial needs without entering on colonial expansion. It takes no war to accomplish this honorably. Whatever land we may need in our business we may buy in the open market as we buy coal. If the owners will accept our price it needs no Imperialism to foot the bills. But the question of such need is one for commercial experts, not for politicians. Our decision should be in the interest of commerce, not of sea power. We need, no doubt, navy enough to protect us from insults, even though every battleship, Charles Sumner pointed out fifty years ago, costs as much as Harvard College, and though schools, not battleships, make the strength of the United States. We have drawn more strength from Harvard College than from a thousand men-of-war. Once Spain owned some battleships, as many and as swift as ours, but she had no men of science to handle them. A British fleet bottled up at Santiago or Cavite would have given a very different account of itself. It is men not ships which make a navy. It is our moral and material force, our brains and character and ingenuity and wealth that make America a power among the nations, not her battleships. These are only visible symptoms designed to impress the ignorant or incredulous. The display of force saves us from insults-from those who do not know our mettle. Men say that we want nobler political problems than those we have. We are tired of our tasks "artificial and transient," "insufferably parochial," and seek some new ones worthy of our national bigness. I have no patience with such talk as this. The greatest political problems the world has ever known are ours to-day and still unsolved, the problems of free men in freedom. Because these are hard and trying we would shirk them in order to meddle with the affairs of our weak-minded neighbors. So we are tired of the labor problem, the corporation problem, the race problem, the problem of coinage, of municipal government and the greatest problem of all, that of the oppression of the individual man by the social combinations to which he belongs, by those to which he does not belong, and by the corporate power of society which may become the greatest tyrant of all. Then let us turn to the politics of Guam and Mindanao, and let our own difficulties settle themselves! Shame on our cowardice! Are the politics of Luzon cleaner than those of New York? We would give our blood to our country, would we not? Then let us give her our brains. More than the blood of heroes she needs the intelligence of men. |