Part 4 (2/2)
Necessity is a large and a vague word; it may mean any degree of compulsion or freedom. Yet the Chinese official is right when he emphasises the immensity of the economic forces driving the Western nations outward. Not adventure, ambition or religious propagandism will account for the full momentum of this movement. Back of the missionaries, traders, soldiers, financiers, diplomats, who are opening up ”backward” countries stand hundreds of millions of people, whose primary daily needs make them unconscious imperialists.
At the bottom this outward driving force is the breeding impulse, the growth of population. In 1800, one hundred and twenty-two millions of people lived in western Europe, whereas in 1900 the population was two hundred and forty millions,[2] and the rate of increase is still rapid.
The population has doubled; the area has remained the same. The new millions cannot be fed or clothed according to their present standard of living unless food and raw materials come from abroad. They depend for their existence on outside agricultural countries.
This increase of European population, moreover, has been a net increase, after emigration has been deducted. {77} Although during the last century tens of millions of immigrants have gone from western Europe to the United States, Canada, Brazil and the Argentine; the home population has increased by over one hundred and seventeen millions and is to-day increasing by twenty millions a decade.[3] For all of these twenty millions no sufficient outlet can be found either in old or in new lands. The problem, therefore, is not to find homes for them abroad but to secure their existence at home. And this existence can only be secured by raising the necessary food in distant agricultural countries and by turning over a large part of western Europe to manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Colonisation, imperialism, the opening up of new agricultural countries, is therefore the other side of industrialism.
The present revolution in the world to-day is thus in a real sense a sequel to the industrial revolution, which gave birth to our modern industry. That imposing industry depends upon non-industrial populations, who produce food, cotton, wood and copper, and exchange them for manufactured goods. Since the people who fas.h.i.+on and transport products must be fed by those who raise them, agricultural production must be stimulated at home and abroad. The nation must expand economically. This expansion, which is broader than what is usually called imperialism, is not a merely political process. It takes small account of national boundaries, but develops farming wherever possible.
The movement is vast and intricate: Commerce {78} between industry and agriculture is carried to the outermost parts of the earth; Africa is divided up, colonies, dependencies and protectorates are acquired; agriculture is promoted in politically independent countries, and an internal colonisation, a colonisation within one's own country, occurs simultaneously. In Australia, the Canadian West, in Argentine, in Siberia settlers lay virgin fields under the plough, and the new lands are bound commercially to the great complex of Western industrial nations.
They are also bound psychologically. As the machine which conquered the nation now conquers the world, so the spirit of Manchester and London and of Pittsburgh and New York rules ancient peoples, breaking up their rigid civilisations, as it rules naked savages in the Congo forests. It is a materialistic, rationalistic, machine-wors.h.i.+pping spirit. The unconscious Christian missionaries to China, who teach the natives not to smoke opium and not to bind the feet of their women, are unwittingly introducing conceptions of life, as hostile to traditional Christianity as to Confucianism or Buddhism. They are teaching the gospel of steam, the eternal verities of mechanics, and the true doctrine of pounds, s.h.i.+llings and pence. Feudalism, conservatism, family piety, are dissolved; and, as the conquering mobile civilisations impinge upon quiescent peoples, new ambitions and desires are created among populations. .h.i.therto content to live as their forefathers lived. These desires are the inlet of the restless discontent which we call European civilisation. When the ancient peoples, civilised or not, desire guns, whiskey, cotton goods, watches and lamps, their dependence upon Western civilisation is a.s.sured.
Bound to the industrial nations, they toil in mines or on tropical plantations that they may buy the goods they have learned to want, and that Europe may live.
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In this cosmopolitan division of labour, which destroys the old economic self-sufficiency of nations, England took the lead. A hundred years ago, when the British agriculturist sold his produce to the British manufacturer in return for finished wares, and foreign commerce was insignificant, the population was limited by the food it could produce. Every increase in the number of Englishmen meant recourse to less fertile fields, an increase in rents, a lowering of wages and a resultant pauperism. The hideous distress during the Napoleonic Wars and after was largely due to an excessive population striving to live upon narrow agricultural resources.
The alternative presented was to stop bearing children or find food abroad; stagnation or industrialism. If England (with Wales) could in 1821 barely support twelve millions, how could she maintain thirty-six millions in 1911? Only by going over to free trade, by raising her food and raw materials in countries where land was cheap, and employing her people in converting these into finished products. To-day three live in England better than one lived before; on the other hand, a large part of the food supply is raised abroad.
Had Great Britain literally become ”the workshop of the world,”
manufacturing for sixteen hundred million inhabitants, there would have been no limit to her possible increase in population. No such national monopoly, however, was possible, or from a world point of view desirable. Belgium, France, Germany and later other thickly populated countries were also faced with the choice between stagnation and industrialism, and as English machines, English industrial methods and English factory organisation could be imported, these nations, one after another, went over to manufacturing, ceased to export food and {80} began to import both food and raw materials, competing with Great Britain for industrial supremacy.
These competing industrial nations had a great common interest, to increase the total food and raw materials to be bought and therefore the manufactured products to be sold. The greater the development of foreign agriculture the better for industry in all these nations. To secure this agricultural base abroad, the nation was not compelled to establish its own colonies, for Belgium and Holland could buy food and raw materials even if the Congo and Java were nonexistent. As a consumer it made little difference to England whether she got her wheat from Russia or India, or her sugar from Germany or Mauritius, so long as the supply was plentiful, cheap and constant. Actually a large part of the food supply came from politically independent countries, the United States alone increasing its food exports from fifty-one millions of dollars in 1860 to five hundred and forty-five millions in 1900, and its cotton in equal ratio.
But as American economic development proves, it is difficult to maintain this common agricultural base. The agricultural nation, in the temperate zone, grows in population, converts itself into an industrial community, and not only consumes its own food and raw materials but draws upon the common agricultural fund of the older industrial nations. To-day the United States is rapidly lessening its food exports, is increasing its imports of sugar, coffee, tea, fish, and other foods, and is thus forcing industrial Europe to find a new agricultural base.
This conversion of agricultural into semi-industrial nations proceeds rapidly. Switzerland, Austria, Italy, j.a.pan, even Russia, increase their manufacturing, and intensify the demand for the world's supply of raw materials. It is a normal and in present circ.u.mstances an inevitable {81} process. When, however, the exportable supply of food and raw material of an agricultural country dwindles, a new equilibrium must be established. New states, territories, colonies, hitherto exporting but little agricultural produce, are opened and their production stimulated. From Russia, the Danube Valley, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentine and many parts of Africa, new supplies of raw material are secured. Fresh sources are also discovered for the production of fodder, flax, cotton, wool and ores. It is an equilibrium, forever destroyed and forever re-established, between an increasing number of industrial nations with increasing populations and new agricultural bases, upon which the superstructure of the world's export industry is reared.
It is not, however, by the sale of present manufactured goods alone that the industrial nations can secure their foreign food. One may own abroad as well as earn abroad. An Englishman with a thousand acres in North Dakota or Alberta may export the wheat that he raises exactly as though the farm were in Devon. If he owns shares in the Pennsylvania Railroad, he may with his dividends purchase wheat, which he may s.h.i.+p to his own country without exporting commodities in return. The true economic dominion of England extends wherever Englishmen hold property.
Subject to the laws of the land where the property is held, this owners.h.i.+p gives the same claim to the product of industry as does an investment at home.
As we read the imperialistic literature of to-day, we discover that the chief emphasis is laid on the great value of new countries as a field for this sort of profitable investment. Investment, not commerce, is the decisive factor, and money is to be made out of opportunities to build railroads, open mines, construct harbours and irrigate arid districts. The diamond mines of the Transvaal were more {82} attractive to the English than the chance to trade, and what was of immediate value in Morocco were the iron mines and future railways and not the right to sell tallow candles to the Berbers.
In large part this foreign investment of capital has the effect of broadening the agricultural base. While to the individual investor, capital export means getting eight per cent. instead of four, and to the promoter, a chance to make a few hundred thousand dollars or pounds, to the industrial nation it means that a fund is created which will help pay for a steady flow of agricultural products and raw materials. To the whole complex of industrial nations and to the world at large it means even more. The export of capital increases the capacity of the agricultural nation to serve as a feeder to all industrial peoples. It provides cheap transportation and improved agricultural machinery. Had Great Britain not invested in American railways during the fifties the United States would have exported less food to Europe in the seventies. Freight rates dropped and the industrial nations were flooded with cheap wheat. British capital in American railways aided British manufacturing more than if the same capital had been placed at home. To-day for the same reason the process continues elsewhere. In Russia, South East Europe, Canada, Australia, South America, Asia and Africa, capital, furnished by the industrial countries, is increasing the production and exportation of food and of raw materials, and is thus indirectly promoting the industry of western Europe.[4]
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Such investment abroad is not new. In the Middle Ages the bankers of Northern Italy, and later of Spain and Portugal advanced small sums to impecunious foreign sovereigns. But the thousand marks borrowed by Henry V from Genoese merchants, or the loans made by Holland in the 18th Century, did not compare with the vast sums invested by England since the Napoleonic Wars, nor by other countries since 1850. For, as in manufacturing, so also in the export of capital, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and even the United States entered the field. The source from which capital could be obtained widened with the increase in the number of wealthy industrial nations, and the volume of investment expanded rapidly. The foreign investments of the United Kingdom, according to an estimate made by Dr. Bowley, amounted in 1854 to two and three-quarter billions of dollars. For 1914, sixty years later, these holdings were estimated at seventeen and one-half billions. It is believed that the French have invested some eight billions of dollars and the Germans four billions.[5] The entire foreign investment of capital by the industrial nations of Europe cannot have amounted (in 1914) to less than thirty-two or thirty-five billions of dollars.[6]
If this great investment were made solely in countries with a highly developed capitalism, with stable political conditions and strong economic ambitions, no imperialistic policy would be necessary.
England need not ”own” the United States in order to invest here safely or for purposes of trade. Nor is she under an economic compulsion to rule Canada or Australasia. Were these British colonies quite independent politically, Canadians and Australians would {84} still endeavour to sell wheat and mutton to Europe and to attract and protect European capital. Their own self-interest, not any outside compulsion, makes them serve European, in serving their own interests. In Morocco, on the other hand, and in Tunis, Persia, Jamaica, Senegal and the Congo, the situation is different. The natives of these lands lack most of the elements which make for the ordered economic development demanded by Europe. Under native rule there is governmental incompetence and venality, disorder, revolt, apathy and economic conservatism. Foreign investment is impossible and trade precarious.
It is here where the industrial system of Western Europe impinges upon the backward countries that economic expansion merges into modern imperialism.
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