capitalist nation
must accept the results of that ownership just as those who remain in
Newfoundland must accept the winter storms.

The owners of American timber, mines, factories, railroads, banks and
newspapers may dislike the connotations of imperialism; may believe
firmly in the principles of competition and individualism; may yearn for
the nineteenth century isolation which was so intimate a feature of
American economic life. But their longings are in vain. The old world
has passed forever; the sun has risen on a new day--a day of world
contacts for the United States.

Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts stated the matter with rare accuracy
in a speech which he made during the discussion over the conquest of the
Philippines. After explaining that wars come, "never ostensibly, but
actually from economic causes," Senator Lodge said (_Congressional
Record_, 56th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 637. January 7, 1901):

"We occupy a great position economically. We are marching on to a still
greater one. You may impede it, you may check it, but you cannot stop
the work of economic forces. You cannot stop the advance of the United
States.... The American people and the economic forces which underlie
all are carrying us forward to the economic supremacy of the world."

Senator Lodge spoke the economic truth in 1901. William C. Redfield
reenforced it in an address before the American Manufacturers Export
Association (_Weekly Bulletin_, April 26, 1920, p. 7): "We cannot be
foreign merchants very much longer in this country excepting on a
diminishing and diminishing scale--we have got to become foreign
constructors; we have got to build with American money--foreign
enterprises, railroads, utilities, factories, mills, I know not what, in
order that by large ownership in them we may command the trade that
normally flows from their operation." That is sound capitalist doctrine.
Equally sound is the exhortation that follows: "In so doing we shall be
doing nothing new--only new for us. That is the way in which Germany and
Great Britain have built up their foreign trade."

New it is for America--but it is the course of empire, familiar to every
statesman. The lesson which Bismarck, Palmerston and Gray learned in the
last century is now being taught by economic pressure to the ruling
class of the United States.

The elder generation of American business men was not trained for world
domination. To them the lesson comes hard. The busi