San Francisco Call, Volume 85, Number 60, 29 January 1899 — ANTI-IMPERIALISM: BY DAVID STARR JORDAN. [ARTICLE]

ANTI-IMPERIALISM: BY DAVID STARR JORDAN.

Paris Special to the Sunday Call.

By QerveVieVe Qreen.

PERHAPS It is safe to say that fully three- fourths of the people who visit Paris, particularly Americans, see only one side of the many h\f]n<\ old city. It is the life, the gayety, the Paris of to-day, that Interest them. They visit the big stores, the operas, the theaters, the principal museums, drive a few times on the Bols de «r.e. and then feel that they know The delightful old city that reaches it on the other side of the Seine, -whore the byways and alleys of history end romance are situated, is very rarely ••explored, and yet there is no diversion in Paris that can be made more interesting than a stroll through these old, forgotten quarters:. r day. while on such an expedition, hours away from the noisy, bustling, ."Bn-de-sfecle Paris, I came across a little flowing picturesquely by dilapidated ses. "What have we here?" I ex:oud. in my surprise. "A river flowing through Paris that I have never of:" n I looked about for some one to mate. An old man at a corner brasserie was tranquilly smoking a pipe. He y the variety of individual that ■I bave been there. Any one younger or gayer would have been out of tune *' i;h Hndlnga, "Will you please me what river this is?" I asked him cr at the same time a little compunction about disturbing him. I was sure his thoughts would have to travel through many years before they could \ reach me. •You are a stranger?" he said, blowing up a huge whiff of smoke. I was delighted • th.it he should end his phrase with an in::ation. The combination of my ignorance with my accent should have made Jt superfluous. "Have you not heard of Bievre?" he continued. •'The Bievre," I repeated. "No, I don't .think it was in my geography. If it were ■ T have entirely forgotten it." **Thea your geography was a ver" *"ad •■ ene," be Bald. "The Bievre is a famous ; -fiver. The ancient French chroniclers have much to say about the peculiar ties that it possesses. You have I of the Gobelin tapestries, haven't ' you?" I felt a little bit insulted. "All the world ■has heard of the Gobelin tapestries," I and my response struck the right churd. nrai, e'esrt vrai." exclaimed the t>ld man, enthusiastically, for the first time removing his pipe from his mouth. "There is nothing in the world more famous than the Gobelin tapestries, and I have worked on many a one." Had he declared that he was Napoleon I in a reincarnation he could not have ex--1 it with a greater pride or dignity. ' he continued, "my father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather

CAST May I spoke before my people at home on the subject of Imperialism. I took my title, as I take now my text, from Kipling's "Recessional," the noblest

hymn of our century: "Lest we forget." For It seemed to me then, Just after the battle of Manila, that we might forget who we are and what we stand for. In the sudden intoxication of far-off victory, with the consciousness of power and courage, with the feeling that all the world is talking of us, our great stern mother patting us on the back, and all the lesser peoples looking on in fear or envy, we might lose our heads.

But greater glory than this has been ours before. For more than a century our nation has stood for something higher and nobler than success in war, something not enhanced by a victory at sea, or a wild, bold charge over a hill lined with ma; ed batteries. We have stood for civic ideals, and the greatest of these, that government should make men by giving them freedom to make themselves. The glory of the American republic is that it is the embodiment of American manhood. It was the dream of the fathers that this should always be so — that American government and republican manhood should be coextensive, that the nation shall not go where freedom cannot go. Colonial expansion Is not national growth. By the spirit of our constitution our nation can expand only with the growth of freedom. It is composed not of land but of men. It Is a selfgoverning people, gathered in self-gov-erning United States. There is no objection to national expansion where honorably brought about. If there were any more space to be occupied by American citizens, who could take care of themselves, we would cheerfully overflow and fill it. But colonial aggrandizement Is not national expansion; slaves are not men. Wherever degenerate, dependent or alien races are within our borders to-day, they are not part of the United States. They constitute a social problem; a menace to peace and welfare. There is no solution of race problem or class problem until race or class can solve it for itself. Unless the negro can make a man of himself through the agencies of freedom, free ballot, free schools, free religions, there can be no solution of the

race problem. Already Booker Washington warns us that this problem unsettled Is a national danger greater than the attack of armies within or without. The race problems of the tropics are perennial and insoluble, for free institutions cannot exist where free men cannot live.

The territorial expansion now contemplated would not extend our institutions, because the proposed colonies are incapable of civilized self-government. It would not extend our nation, because these regions are already full of alien races, and are not habitable by AngloSaxon people. The strength of AngloSaxon civilization lies in the mental and physical activity of men and in th»: growth of the home. Where activity is fatal to life, the Anglo-Saxon decays, mentally, morally, physically. The home cannot endure In the climate of the tropics. Mr. Ingersoll once said that if a colony of New England preachers and Yankee schoolma'ams were established in the West Indies the third generation would be seen riding bareback on Sunday to the cock-fights. Civilization Is, as it were, suffocated in the tropics. It lives, as Benjamin Kidd suggests, as though under deficiency of oxygen. The only American who can live in the tropics without demoralization is the one who has duties at home and will never go there. The freedom of Spanish America Is for the most part miiltary despotism. It Is said of the government of Russia that it is "despotism tempered by assassination." That of most of our sister republics is assassination tempered by despotism. Mexico, the best of them, is not a republic; it is a despotism, the splendid tyranny of a man strong and wise, who knows Mexico and how to govern her, a humane and beneficent tyrant. We shall find in Cuba all the problems that vex Latin America. There are three things inseparable from the life of the Cuban people — the cigarette, the lottery ticket and the machete. These stand for vice, superstition and revenge. We are pledged to give self-govern-ment to Cuba. This we cannot do in full without the risk of seeing it relapse Into an anarchy as repulsive, if not as hopeless, as the tyranny of Spain. Only the splendid apparition of the man on horseback could bring this to an end. The dictator may bring law, but not democracy. Its ultimate fate and ours is annexation. It is too near us and our interests for us to leave It to Its fate, and to the schemes of its own small politicians. It therefore remains for us to annex and assimilate

Cuba, but not at once. We must take our time, ami do it in decency and order, as we ha%"e taken Alaska and Hawaii. We take Cuba, Porto Rico and Hawaii, not because we want them, but because we have no friends who can manage them well and give us no trouble, and it is possible that in a century or so they may become part of our nation as well as of our territory. American enterprise will ilow into Cuba, no doubt, when Cuba Is free. It will clean up the cities, stamp out the fevers, build roads where the trails for mule sleds are, and railroads where the current of traffic goes. Doubtless a great industrial awakening will follow our occupation of Cuba when we have taken away the barrier of our tariffs. The Anglo-Saxon nations have certain ideals on which their political superstructure rests. The great political service of England is to teach respect for law. The British empire rests on British law. The great political service of the United States is to teach respect for the individual man. The American republic rests on individual manhood, the "right divine of man, the million trained to be free." The chief agency in the development of free manhood is the recognition of the individual man as the responsible unit of government. This recognition is not confined to local and municipal affairs, as is practically the case in England, but extends to all branches of government. It is the axiom of democracy that "government must derive its Just powers from the consent of the governed." No such consent justifies slavery; hence our Union "could not endure half slave, half free." No such consent justifies our hold on Alaska, Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, the Ladrones or the Philippines. The people do not want us, our ways, our business, or our government. It is said nowadays that wherever our flag is raised it must never be hauled down. To haul down an American flag is an Insult to Old Glory. But this patriotism rings counterfeit. It would touch a truer note to say that wherever our flag goes it shall bring good government.

Take the Philippines or leave them! No half-way measures can be permanent. To rule at arm's length is to fail in government. These islands must belong to the United States, or else they must belong to the people who inhabit them. If we govern the Philippines, so in their degree must the Philippines govern us. There are some economists who intelligently favor colonial extension to-day because to handle colonies successfully must force on us English forms of gov-

ernment. A dose of imperialism would stiffen the back of our democracy. It is true, no doubt, that our standing in the world is lowered because our best statesmen are not in politics to the degree that they are in England. The rules of the game shut them out. But I believe that we can change these rules by forces now at work. Wiser voters will demand better representatives, but these must keep in touch with the people, acting with them and through them, never in their stead. For reasons I shall give later on I believe that to adopt British forma, with all their unquestioned advantages, would be a step backward and downward. The chief real argument for the retention of the Philippines rests on the belief that if we do not take them they will fall into worse hands. This may be true, but it is open to question. It is easy to treat them as Spain has done; but none of the eloquent voices raised for annexation has yet suggested anything better. We must also recognize that the nerve and courage of Dewey and his associates seem spent to little avail if we cast away what we have won. To leave the Philippines, after all this, seems like patriotism under false pretenses. But nothing could have induced us to accept these islands, if offered for nothing, before the battle of Manila.

So far aa the Philippines are concerned, the only righteous thing to do would be to recognize the independence of the Philippines under American protection, and to lend them our army and navy and our wisest counselors, our Dewey and our Merritt, not our politicians, but our jurists, our teachers, with foresters, electricians, manufacturers, mining experts and experts in the various Industries. Then, after they have h£d a fair chance and shown that they cannot care for themselves, we should turn them over quietly to the paternalism of peace-loving Holland or peace-compelling Great Britain. We should not get our money back, but we should save our honor. The only sensible thing to do would be to pull out some dark night and escape from the great problem of the Orient as suddenly and as dramatically as we got into it. As for trade, to take a weak nation by the throat is not the righteous way to win its trade. It is not true that "trade follows the flag." Trade flies through the open door. To open the door of the Orient is to open our own* doors to Asia. To do this hurries us on toward the final "manifest destiny," the leveling of the nations. Where the barriers are all broken down, and the.

world becomes one vast commercial republic, there will be leveling down of government, character, ideals, as well as leveling up. "We want," some say, "our hands in Oriental affairs when the great struggle follows the breaking up of China." Others would have "American freedom upheld as a torchlight amid the darkness of Oriental despotism." We cannot show American civilisation where American institutions cannot exist. But the spirit of freedom goes with its deeds.

I do not urge the money cost of holding the Philippines as an argument against annexation. No dependent colony, honestly administered, ever repaid its cost to the government, and this colony holds out not the slightest promise of such a result. In fact, the cost of conquest and maintenance in life and gold is in grotesque excess of any possible advantage to trade or to civilization. Individuals grow rich, but no honest government gets its money back. But with all this, if annexation is a duty, it is such regardless of cost. But America has governmental ideals of the development of the individual man. England has no care for the man, only for .civic order. This unfits America for certain tasks for which England is prepared. But though one in blood with England, our course of political activities has not lain parallel wilh hers. We were estranged in the beginning, and we have had other affairs on our hands. We have turned our faces westward, and our work has made us strong. We have had our forests to clear, our prairies to break, our rivers to harness, our own problem of slavery to adjust. While England has been making trade we have been making men. We have no machinery to govern colonies well. We want no such machinery if we can help It. The habit of our people and the tendency of our forms of government are to lead people to mind their own business. Only the business of individuals or groups of individuals receives attention. Our representatives In Congress are our attorneys, retained to look after our interests, the interest of the State or district, not of the nation. A colony has no attorney, and its demands, as matters now stand, must go by default. This is the reason why we fail in the government of colonies. This is the reason why our consular service is weak and inefficient. This is the reason why our forests are wasted year by year. Nothing is well done in a republic unless it touches the interest or catches the attention of the people. Unless a colony knows what

good government Is and insists loudly on ,2" \! ng [t ' with some means to make itself heard, it will be neglected and abused. This is why every body of people under the American flag must have a share in the American government. When a colony knows what good government is it ceases to be a colony and can take care of itself. To do what England does we must take lessons of England's methods. Toward- the English system we mußt approach more and more closely If we are to deal with foreign interests in large fashion. The town-meeting idea must give way to centralization of power. We must look away from our own affairs, neglect them even, until the pressure of growing expenditure forces us to attend to them again more carefully than we ever yet have done. One reason England is governed well is that misgovernment anywhere on any large scale would be fatal to her credit and fatal to her power. She must call her best men to her service because without them she would perish. Our government must be changed for our changing needs. We must give up our whole protective system at the demand of commerce. I. for one, shall never weep at that. But we must abandon our childish notions that America is a world of herself, big enough to maintain a separate basis of coinage, a freeman's scale of wages or a social order of her own. We must give up the checks and balances in our constitution. It is said that our great battleship Oregon can turn about, end for end, within her own length. The dominant nation must have the same power. She must be capable of reversing her action in a minute, or turning around within her own length. This "our prate of statutes and of state" makes impossible. We shall receive many hard knocks before we reach this condition, but we must reach it If we are to "work mightily" in the affairs of the other nations. If we are to deal with crises in foreign affairs we must hold them with a steadier grasp than that with which we have held the Cuban question. The Spanish Peace Commission knows well that It is no empire with which it has to deal. An empire knows its own mind and never yields a point. As matters are now President, Senate and House check each other's movements, and the State falls over its own feet.

The question Is not whether Great Britain or the United States has the better form of government or the nobler civic mission. There is room in the world for two types of Anglo-Saxon nations, and nothing has yet happened to show that civilization would gain if either 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 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. Infinitely stronger for the cause of freedom, says Justice Brewer, "than the power of our armies, is the force of our example." 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.

Some great changes in our system are inevitable, and belong to the coursa of natural progress. Against these I have nothing to say. Whatever our part in the affairs of the world, we should play it manfully. I make no plea tot self-sufficiency, indifference, or isolation for isolation's sake. To shirk tha world-movements or to drift with tha

current would be alike unworthy of our origin, our history and our ideals. In closing let me repeat what seem to me the three main reasons for opposing every step toward imperialism. First, dominion is brute force. To furnish such power we shall need a colonial bureau, with its force of extra-na-tional police. A large army and navy must justify itself by doing something. An army and navy we must maintain for our own defense, but beyond that they can do little that does not hurt, and they must be used if they would be kept alive. The other reasons concern the integrity of the republic itself. This was the lesson of slavery, that no republic can "endure half slave and half free." The republics of antiquity fell because they were republics of the free only. for each citizen rested on the backs of nine slaves. A republic cannot be an oligarchy as well. Whatever form of control we adopt, we shall be in fact slave-drivers, and the business of slavedriving will react upon us. Slavery itself was a disease which came to us from the British West Indies. It breeds in the tropics like yellow fever and leprosy. Can even an imperial republic last, part slave, part free? • « •

Meanwhile, the real problems of civilization develop and ripen. They care nothing for the greatness of empire or the glitter of imperialism. They must be solved by men, and each man must help solve his own problems. The development of republican manhood is just now the most important matter that any nation in the world has on hand. We have been fairly successful thus far, but perhaps only fairly. Our government is careless, wasterful and unjust, but our men are growing self-contained and wise. Despite the annual invasion of foreign illiteracy, despite the degeneration of congested cities, the individual intelligence of men stands higher in America than in any other part of the world. The bearing of the people at large in these days is a lesson in itself.

The day of the nations as nations is passing. National ambitions, national hopes, national aggrandizement — all these may become public nuisances. Imperialism, like feudalism, belongs to the past. The men of the world as men, not as nations, are drawing closer and closer together. The final guarantee of peace and good will among men will be not the parliament of nations, but the self-control of men. Whatever the fateful twentieth century may bring, the first great duty of Americans is never to forget that men are more than nations, that wisdom is more than glory, and virtue more than dominion of the sea. The nation exists for its men, never the men for the nation. "The only government that I recognize," said Thoreau, "and it matters not how few are at the head of it or how small its army, is the power that established justice in the land, never that which established injustice." The will of free men to be just one toward another is our best guarantee that "government of the people, for the people, and by the people, shall not perish from the earth." Gad of our fathers, known of old,Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hojd Dominion over palm and pine,— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget— lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away. On dune and headland sinks the fire} Lo. all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet. Lest we forget— lest we forget! — Tho N«w World.