What is the practical outcome of the situation which the facts detailed in the last chapter make plain? Must nations like Germany conclude that, because there can be no duplication of the fight for empty territory which took place between European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and because talk of the German conquest of British Colonies is childish nonsense, Germany must therefore definitely surrender any hope of expansion, and accept a secondary position because she happens to have “come too late into the world”? Are Germans with all their activities and scientific thoroughness, and with such a lively sense of the difficulty of finding room in the world for the additional million of Germans every year quietly to accept the status quo?

If our thoughts were not so distorted by misleading political imagery, it is doubtful whether it would ever occur to us that such a “problem” existed.

When one nation, say England, occupies a territory, does it mean that that territory is “lost” to Germans? We know this to be an absurdity. Germany does an enormous and increasing trade with the territory that has been preempted by the Anglo-Saxon race. Millions of Germans in Germany gain their livelihood by virtue of German enterprise and German industry in Anglo-Saxon countries⁠—indeed, it is the bitter and growing complaint of Englishmen that they are being driven out of these territories by the Germans; that where originally British shipping was universal in the East,35 German shipping is now coming to occupy the prominent place; that the trade of whole territories which Englishmen originally had to themselves is now being captured by Germans, and this not merely where the fiscal arrangements are more or less under the control of the British Government, as in the Crown Colonies, but in those territories originally British but now independent, like the United States, as well as in those territories which are in reality independent, though nominally still under British control, like Australia and Canada.

Moreover, why need Germany occupy the extraordinary position of phantom “ownership,” which England occupies, in order to enjoy all the real benefits which in our day result from a Colonial Empire? More Germans have found homes in the United States in the last half-century than have Englishmen in all their Colonies. It is calculated that between ten and twelve millions of the population of the United States are of direct German descent. It is true, of course, that Germans do not live under their flag, but it is equally true that they do not regret that fact, but rejoice in it! The majority of German emigrants do not desire that the land to which they go shall have the political character of the land which they leave behind. The fact that in adopting the United States they have shed something of the German tradition and created a new national type, partaking in part of the English and in part of the German, is, on the whole, very much to their advantage⁠—and incidentally to ours.

Of course it is urged that, despite all this, the national sentiment will always desire, for the overflow of its population, territories in which that nation’s language, law, and literature reign. But how far is that aspiration one of those purely political aspirations still persisting, it is true, but really the result of the momentum of old ideas, the outcome of facts long since passed away, and destined to disappear as soon as the real facts have been absorbed by the general public?

Thus a German will shout patriotically, and, if needs be, embroil his country in a war for an equatorial or Asiatic colony; the truth being that he does not think about the matter seriously. But if he and his family have to emigrate, he does think about it seriously, and then it is another matter; he does not choose Equatorial Africa or China; he goes to the United States, which he knows to be a far better country in which to make his home than the Cameroons or Kiau Chau could ever be. Indeed, in England’s own case, are not certain foreign countries much more her real colonies for her children of the future than certain territory under her own flag? Will not her children find better and more congenial conditions, more readily build real homes, in Pennsylvania, which is “foreign,” than in Bombay, which is “British”?

Of course, if by sheer military conquest it were possible to turn a United States or even a Canada into a real Germany⁠—of German language, law, literature⁠—the matter would assume another aspect. But the facts dealt with in the last chapter show that the day is past for conquest in that form. Quite other means must be employed. The German conqueror of the future would have to say with Napoleon: “I come too late. The nations are too firmly set.” Even when the English, the greatest colonizers of the world, conquer a territory like the Transvaal or the Orange Free State, they have no resort, having conquered it, but to allow its own law, its own literature, its own language to have free play, just as though the conquest had never taken place. This was even the case with Quebec more than one hundred years ago, and Germany will have to be guided by a like rule. On the morrow of conquest she would have to proceed to establish her real ascendancy by other than military means⁠—a thing she is free to do today, if she can. It cannot throughout this discussion be too often repeated that the world has been modified, and that what was possible to the Canaanites and the Romans, and even to the Normans, is no longer possible to us. The edict can no longer go forth to “slay every male child” that is born into the conquered territory, in order that the race may be exterminated. Conquest in this sense is impossible. The most marvellous colonial history in the world⁠—British colonial history⁠—demonstrates that in this field physical force is no longer of avail.

And Germans are beginning to realize it. “We must resign ourselves in all clearness and calm to the fact that there is no possibility of acquiring Colonies suitable for emigration,” writes Dr. P. Rohrbach. He continues:

But if we cannot have such Colonies, it by no means follows that we cannot obtain the advantages, if only to a limited extent, which make these Colonies desirable. It is a mistake to regard the mere possession of extensive transoceanic territories, even when they are able to absorb a part of the national surplus of population, as necessarily a direct increase of power. Australia, Canada, and South Africa do not increase the power of the British Empire because they are British possessions, nor yet because they are peopled by a few million British emigrants and their descendants, but because by trade with them the wealth and with it the defensive strength of the Mother Country are increased. Colonies which do not produce that result have but little value; and countries which possess this importance for a nation, even though they are not its Colonies, are in this decisive point a substitute for colonial possessions in the ordinary sense.36

In fact the misleading political imagery to which I referred a few pages back has gone far to destroy our sense of reality and sense of proportion in the matter of political control of foreign territory, a fact which the diplomatic turmoil of 1911 most certainly illustrated. I had occasion at the time to emphasize it in the following terms:

The Press of Europe and America is very busy discussing the lessons of the diplomatic conflict which has just ended, and the military conflict which has just begun. And the outstanding impression which one gets from most of these essays in high politics⁠—whether French, Italian, or British⁠—is that we have been and still are witnessing part of a great world movement, the setting in motion of Titanic forces “deep-set in primordial needs and impulses.”

For months those in the secrets of the Chancelleries have spoken with bated breath⁠—as though in the presence of some vision of Armageddon. On the strength of this mere talk of war by the three nations, vast commerical interests have been embarrassed, fortunes have been lost and won on the Bourses, banks have suspended payment, some thousands have been ruined; while the fact that the fourth and fifth nations have actually gone to war has raised all sorts of further possibilities of conflict, not alone in Europe, but in Asia, with remoter danger of religious fanaticism and all its sequelae. International bitterness and suspicion in general have been intensified, and the one certain result of the whole thing is that immense burdens will be added in the shape of further taxation for armaments to the already heavy ones carried by the five or six nations concerned. For two or three hundred millions of people in Europe, life, which with all the problems of high prices, labor wars, unsolved social difficulties, is none too easy as it is, will be made harder still.

The needs, therefore, that can have provoked a conflict of these dimensions must be “primordial” indeed. In fact one authority assures us that what we have seen going on is “the struggle for life among men”⁠—that struggle which has its parallel in the whole of sentient existence.

Well, I put it to you, as a matter worth just a moment or two of consideration, that this conflict is about nothing of the sort; that it is about a perfectly futile matter, one which the immense majority of the German, English, French, Italian, and Turkish people could afford to treat with the completest indifference. For, to the vast majority of these 250,000,000 people more or less, it does not matter two straws whether Morocco or some vague African swamp near the Equator is administered by German, French, Italian, or Turkish officials, so long as it is well administered. Or rather one should go further: if French, German, or Italian colonization of the past is any guide, the nation which wins in the contest for territory of this sort has added a wealth-draining incubus.

This, of course, is preposterous; I am losing sight of the need for making provision for the future expansion of the race, for each party to “find its place in the sun”; and Heaven knows what!

The European Press was full of these phrases at the time, and I attempted to weigh their real meaning by a comparison of French and German history in the matter of national “expansion” during the last thirty or forty years.

France has got a new empire, we are told; she has won a great victory; she is growing and expanding and is richer by something which her rivals are the poorer for not having.

Let us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that she has made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which represents one of the most successful of those operations of colonial expansion which have marked her history during the last forty years. What has been the precise effect on French prosperity?

In thirty years, at a cost of many millions (it is part of successful colonial administration in France never to let it be known what the Colonies really cost), France has founded in Tunis a Colony, in which today there are, excluding soldiers and officials, about 25,000 genuine French colonists; just the number by which the French population in France⁠—the real France⁠—is diminishing every year! And the value of Tunis as a market does not even amount to the sum which France spends directly on its occupation and administration, to say nothing of the indirect extension of military burdens which its conquest involved; and, of course, the market which it represents would still exist in some form, though England⁠—or even Germany⁠—administered the country.

In other words, France loses every year in her home population a Colony equivalent to Tunis⁠—if we measure Colonies in terms of communities made up of the race which has sprung from the Mother Country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and diplomats can point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially and exotically under conditions which must in the long-run be inimical to their race, it is pointed to as “expansion” and as evidence that France is maintaining her position as a Great Power. In a few years, as history goes, unless there is some complete change in tendencies, which at present seem as strong as ever, the French race, as we know it, will have ceased to exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by the Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are today more Germans in France than there are Frenchmen in all the Colonies that France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French Colonies. France is today a better Colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic Colony which France owns.

“They tell me,” said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite original mot), “that the Germans are at Agadir. I know they are in the Champs-Élysées.” Which, of course, is in reality a much more serious matter.

On the other side we are to assume that Germany has during the period of France’s expansion⁠—since the war⁠—not expanded at all. That she has been throttled and cramped⁠—that she has not had her place in the sun; and that is why she must fight for it and endanger the security of her neighbors.

Well, I put it to you again that all this in reality is false: that Germany has not been cramped or throttled; that, on the contrary, as we recognize when we get away from the mirage of the map, her expansion has been the wonder of the world. She has added twenty millions to her population⁠—one-half the present population of France⁠—during a period in which the French population has actually diminished. Of all the nations in Europe, she has cut the biggest slice in the development of world trade, industry, and influence. Despite the fact that she has not “expanded” in the sense of mere political dominion, a proportion of her population, equivalent to the white population of the whole Colonial British Empire, make their living, or the best part of it, from the development and exploitation of territory outside her borders. These facts are not new, they have been made the text of thousands of political sermons preached in England itself during the last few years; but one side of their significance seems to have been missed.

We get, then, this: On the one side a nation extending enormously its political dominion, and yet diminishing in national force⁠—if by national force we mean the growth of a sturdy, enterprising, vigorous people. (I am not denying that France is both wealthy and comfortable, to a greater degree it may be than her rival; but that is another story.) On the other side, we get immense expansion expressed in terms of those things⁠—a growing and vigorous population, and the possibility of feeding them⁠—and yet the political dominion, speaking practically, has hardly been extended at all.

Such a condition of things, if the common jargon of high politics means anything, is preposterous. It takes nearly all meaning out of most that we hear about “primordial needs” and the rest of it.

As a matter of fact, we touch here one of the vital confusions, which is at the bottom of most of the present political trouble between nations, and shows the power of the old ideas and the old phraseology.

In the days of the sailing ship and the lumbering wagon dragging slowly over all but impassable roads, for one country to derive any considerable profit from another it had practically to administer it politically. But the compound steam-engine, the railway, the telegraph, have profoundly modified the elements of the whole problem. In the modern world political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role as a factor in commerce; the nonpolitical factors have in practice made it all but inoperative. It is the case with every modern nation, actually, that the outside territories which it exploits most successfully are precisely those of which it does not “own” a foot. Even with the most characteristically colonial of all⁠—Great Britain⁠—the greater part of her overseas trade is done with countries which she makes no attempt to “own,” control, coerce, or dominate⁠—and incidentally she has ceased to do any of those things with her Colonies.

Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or make their living out of countries to which their political dominion in no way extends. The modern German exploits South America by remaining at home. Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through political power, he approaches futility. German Colonies are Colonies pour rire. The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her trade with them is microscopic; and if the twenty millions who have been added to Germany’s population since the war had had to depend on their country’s political conquest, they would have had to starve. What feeds them are countries which Germany has never “owned,” and never hopes to “own”: Brazil, Argentina, the United States, India, Australia, Canada, Russia, France, and England. (Germany, which never spent a mark on its political conquest, today draws more tribute from South America than does Spain, which has poured out mountains of treasure and oceans of blood in its conquest.) These are Germany’s real Colonies. Yet the immense interests which they represent, of really primordial concern to Germany, without which so many of her people would be actually without food, are for the diplomats and the soldiers quite secondary ones; the immense trade which they represent owes nothing to the diplomat, to Agadir incidents, to Dreadnoughts: it is the unaided work of the merchant and the manufacturer. All this diplomatic and military conflict and rivalry, this waste of wealth, the unspeakable foulness which Tripoli is revealing, are reserved for things which both sides to the quarrel could sacrifice, not merely without loss, but with profit. And Italy, whose statesmen have been faithful to all the old “axioms” (Heaven save the mark!) will discover it rapidly enough. Even her defenders are ceasing now to urge that she can possibly derive any real benefit from this colossal ineptitude.

Is it not time that the man in the street⁠—verily, I believe, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology⁠—insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportions, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human cooperation?

But are we to assume that the extension of a European nation’s authority overseas can never be worth while; or that it could, or should, never be the occasion for conflict between nations; or that the role of, say, England in India or Egypt, is neither useful nor profitable?

In the second part of this book I have attempted to uncover the general principle⁠—which sadly needs establishing in politics⁠—serving to indicate clearly the advantageous and disadvantageous employment of force. Because force plays an undoubted role in human development and cooperation, it is sweepingly concluded that military force and the struggle between groups must always be a normal feature of human society.

To a critic, who maintained that the armies of the world were necessary and justifiable on the same grounds as the police forces of the world (“Even in communities such as London, where, in our civic capacity, we have nearly realized all your ideals, we still maintain and are constantly improving our police force”), I replied:

When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the running in of burglars and “drunks,” is using them to lead an attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy of “municipal expansion,” or “Civic Imperialism,” or “Pan-Londonism,” or whatnot; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham patriots⁠—when that happens you can safely approximate a police force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the two⁠—the army and the police force⁠—have in reality diametrically opposed roles. The police exist as an instrument of social cooperation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by “capturing” or “subjugating” another, in some unexplained way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another.

In the existing condition of things in England this illustration covers the whole case; the citizens of London would have no imaginable interest in “conquering” Birmingham, or vice versa. But suppose there arose in the cities of the North such a condition of disorder that London could not carry on its ordinary work and trade; then London, if it had the power, would have an interest in sending its police into Birmingham, presuming that this could be done. The citizens of London would have a tangible interest in the maintenance of order in the North⁠—they would be the richer for it.

Order was just as well maintained in Alsace-Lorraine before the German conquest as it was after, and for that reason Germany has not benefited by the conquest. But order was not maintained in California, and would not have been as well maintained under Mexican as under American rule, and for that reason America has benefited by the conquest of California. France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that of India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly speaking, for conquest at all, but for police purposes, for the establishment and maintenance of order; and, so far as they achieved that object, their role was a useful one.

How does this distinction affect the practical problem under discussion? Most fundamentally. Germany has no need to maintain order in England, nor England in Germany, and the latent struggle therefore between these two countries is futile. It is not the result of any inherent necessity of either people; it is the result merely of that woeful confusion which dominates statecraft today, and it is bound, so soon as that confusion is cleared up, to come to an end.

Where the condition of a territory is such that the social and economic cooperation of other countries with it is impossible, we may expect the intervention of military force, not as the result of the “annexationist illusion,” but as the outcome of real social forces pushing to the maintenance of order. That is the story of England in Egypt, or, for that matter, in India. But foreign nations have no need to maintain order in the British Colonies, nor in the United States; and though there might be some such necessity in the case of countries like Venezuela, the last few years have taught us that by bringing these countries into the great economic currents of the world, and so setting up in them a whole body of interests in favor of order, more can be done than by forcible conquest. We occasionally hear rumors of German designs in Brazil and elsewhere, but even the modicum of education possessed by the average European statesman makes it plain to him that these nations are, like the others, “too firmly set” for military occupation and conquest by an alien people.

It is one of the humors of the whole Anglo-German conflict that so much has the British public been concerned with the myths and bogies of the matter that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. While even the wildest Pan-German has never cast his eyes in the direction of Canada, he has cast them, and does cast them, in the direction of Asia Minor; and the political activities of Germany may centre on that area, for precisely the reasons which result from the distinction between policing and conquest, which I have drawn. German industry is coming to have dominating interests in the Near East, and as those interests⁠—her markets and investments⁠—increase, the necessity for better order in, and the better organization of, those territories increases in corresponding degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.

What interest have we in attempting to prevent her? It may be urged that she would close the markets of those territories against us. But even if she attempted it, which she is never likely to do, a Protectionist Asia Minor organized with German efficiency would be better from the point of view of trade than a Free Trade Asia Minor organized à la Turque. Protectionist Germany is one of the best markets in Europe. If a second Germany were created in the Near East, if Turkey had a population with the German purchasing power and the German tariff, the markets would be worth some two hundred to two hundred and fifty millions instead of some fifty to seventy-five. Why should we try to prevent Germany increasing our trade?

It is true that we touch here the whole problem of the fight for the open door in the undeveloped territories. But the real difficulty in this problem is not the open door at all, but the fact that Germany is beating England⁠—or England fears she is beating her in those territories where she has the same tariff to meet that Germany has, or even a smaller one; and that she is even beating England in the territories that the English already “own”⁠—in their Colonies, in the East, in India. How, therefore, would England’s final crushing of Germany in the military sense change anything? Suppose England crushed her so completely that she “owned” Asia Minor and Persia as completely as she owns India or Hong Kong, would not the German merchant continue to beat her even then, as he is beating her now, in that part of the East over which she already holds political sway? Again, how would the disappearance of the German navy affect the problem one way or the other?

Moreover, in this talk of the open door in the undeveloped territories, we again seem to lose all our sense of proportion. English trade is in relative importance first with the great nations⁠—the United States, France, Germany, Argentina, South America generally⁠—after that with the white Colonies; after that with the organized East; and last of all, and to a very small extent, with the countries concerned in this squabble for the open door⁠—territories in which the trade really is so small as hardly to pay for the making and upkeep of a dozen battleships.

When the man in the street, or, for that matter, the journalistic pundit, talks commercial diplomacy, his arithmetic seems to fall from him. Some years since the question of the relative position of the three Powers in Samoa exercised the minds of these wiseacres, who got fearfully warlike both in England and in the United States. Yet the trade of the whole island is not worth that of an obscure Massachusetts village, and the notion that naval budgets should be increased to “maintain our position,” the notion that either of the countries concerned should really think it worth while to build so much as a single battleship the more for such a purpose, is not throwing away a sprat to catch a whale, but throwing away a whale to catch a sprat⁠—and then not catching it. For even when you have the predominant political position, even when you have got your extra Dreadnought or extra dozen Dreadnoughts, it is the more efficiently organized nation on the commercial side that will take the trade. And while England is getting excited over the trade of territories that matter very little, rivals, including Germany, will be quietly walking off with the trade that does matter, will be increasing their hold upon such markets as the United States, Argentina, South America, and the lesser Continental States.

If we really examined these questions without the old meaningless prepossessions, we should see that it is more to the general interest to have an orderly and organized Asia Minor under German tutelage than to have an unorganized and disorderly one which should be independent. Perhaps it would be best of all that Great Britain should do the organizing, or share it with Germany, though England has her hands full in that respect⁠—Egypt and India are problems enough. Why should England forbid Germany to do in a small degree what she has done in a large degree? Sir Harry H. Johnston, in the Nineteenth Century for December, 1910, comes a great deal nearer to touching the real kernel of the problem that is preoccupying Germany than any of the writers on the Anglo-German conflict of whom I know. As the result of careful investigation, he admits that Germany’s real objective is not, properly speaking, England or England’s Colonies at all, but the undeveloped lands of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, down even to the mouth of the Euphrates. He adds that the best informed Germans use this language to him:

In regard to England, we would recall a phrase dropped by ex-President Roosevelt at an important public speech in London, a phrase which for some reason was not reported by the London Press. Roosevelt said that the best guarantee for Great Britain on the Nile is the presence of Germany on the Euphrates. Putting aside the usual hypocrisies of the Teutonic peoples, you know that this is so. You know that we ought to make common cause in our dealing with the backward races of the world. Let Britain and Germany once come to an agreement in regard to the question of the Near East, and the world can scarcely again be disturbed by any great war in any part of the globe, if such a war is contrary to the interests of the two Empires.

Such, declares Sir Harry, is German opinion. And in all human probability, so far as sixty-five million people can be said to have the same opinion, he is absolutely right.

It is because the work of policing backward or disorderly populations is so often confused with the annexationist illusion that the danger of squabbles in the matter is a real one. Not the fact that England is doing a real and useful work for the world at large in policing India creates jealousy of her work there, but the notion that in some way she “possesses” this territory, and draws tribute and exclusive advantage therefrom. When Europe is a little more educated in these matters, the European populations will realize that they have no primordial interest in furnishing the policemen. German public opinion will see that, even if such a thing were possible, the German people would gain no advantage by replacing England in India, especially as the final result of the administrative work of Europe in the Near and Far East will be to make populations like those of Asia Minor in the last resort their own policemen. Should some Power, acting as policeman, ignoring the lessons of history, try again the experiment tried by Spain in South America and later by England in North America, should she try to create for herself exclusive privileges and monopolies, the other nations have means of retaliation apart from the military ones⁠—in the numberless instruments which the economic and financial relationships of nations furnish.