tes shall enter upon a broad national policy, it need not
be determined in just what manner that policy shall be worked out.
Whether the United States shall actually acquire territorial
possessions, shall set up captain generalships and garrisons, whether
they shall adopt the middle ground of protecting sovereignties
nominally independent, or whether they shall content themselves with
naval stations and diplomatic representations as the basis for
asserting their rights to the free commerce of the East, is a matter of
detail."

{50}

I have quoted Mr. Conant at length because he is so largely typical of
the state of mind of the American plutocracy in the year 1898. It
would have been easily possible, however, to have presented any amount
of confirmatory material of exactly the same nature. An article by W.
Dodsworth in the October, 1898 number of the _Nineteenth Century_ is
along the same lines. Here again we read of an unprecedented
industrial revolution during the preceding half century and a vast
increase in foreign trade and accumulated wealth. Again we read of the
falling rate of interest and of the failure of trusts and combines to
resist the outside pressure of necessitous capital, seeking to force
its way into industries. It was held quite impossible for consumption
to absorb the products of an over-fertile industry. "I am no
pessimist," writes Mr. Dodsworth, "but I cannot conceal my deep
conviction that, if this relief is not forthcoming, a stage of grave
industrial collapse, attended with the agitation of equally grave
political issues, becomes only too probable, and the energies of our
seventy-five millions of producers may have to be restrained until we
learn to appreciate the penalty of our neglect of foreign enterprise."

Such were the arguments with which in 1898 the United States plunged
into imperialism. We were to break out of the narrow circle which
confined our economic life to become the work-shop of the world as
England had once been, to export and export and ever increasingly
export until all the nations should be our debtors. Our capital, like
our wares, was to go to all countries. It flattered our pride when, a
few years later, Europe trembled at the spectre of an American
commercial invasion and even England wondered whether she could
withstand the flood of cheap manufactured American goods, dumped on her
{51} shores. We pictured a vastly increasing trade with our new
colonial poss