th century the business men of every
great industrial nation have been compelled to go abroad for raw
materials, for markets and for investment opportunities. In order to
obtain these economic advantages, the citizens of the civilized nations
have not hesitated to plunder the natives, and if they resisted, to
murder them--as Britain has done in India, as Belgium has done in the
Congo, as Japan has done in Korea, as the United States has done in the
Philippines and Hayti. This robbing and murdering is sanctified by the
fact that "our interests were in danger" or that "our flag was fired
upon" or that "our citizens have lost lives and property." But during
the past few decades the exploiting nations have found more than natives
to deal with. In almost every instance there have been at least two
claimants for each choice economic morsel, and a conflict has frequently
resulted, like that between Russia and Japan for the control of Eastern
Asia or between Germany and France for the control of the iron and coal
deposits of Western Europe. In such cases the wars are justified to the
home populations as necessary defensive measures.

The justification may or may not be complete, but the bills must be
paid, and they have proved to be inordinately high. The cost of killing
African natives or unarmed Haytians is comparatively low, but the cost
of killing Frenchmen and Germans is enormous. If, as some experts have
estimated, the direct cost of the Great War was 250 billions of dollars,
and if only 10 millions were killed, it cost something like $25,000 to
kill each of the ten millions. It is at this point that nationalism
breaks down because of the sheer inability of the peoples to foot the
bills that have been contracted in destroying their "enemies"--namely,
the citizens of other nations.

When this point is reached--when the costs of expansion beyond boundary
lines of a nation are so great that the people who do the country's work
cannot or will not meet them, the end of the system that depends upon
expansion is already in sight. That point has been reached and passed in
capitalist society.

While the costs of expansion were merely the cost of subduing naked
savages, the business was a remunerative one; but when, to these
ordinary costs must be added the stupendous price of capturing trenches
protected by barbed wire entanglements, of bombing whole countrysides,
of desolating states and wiping out industries, not to mention th