American World Policies

The hypothesis is far-fetched, but exactly the same result would follow if instead of our agricultural product dwindling, it remained constant while our population grew. If our population increased 100 per cent. and our agricultural product remained stationary or increased only twenty or forty per cent., it would be impossible to maintain our present relation to the world. We must uphold a certain, not quite constant relation between our agricultural (and other extractive) industries and our population if we are to keep out of the thickest of the European complications.

A secure basis for a policy of non-aggression lies therefore in the development of home agriculture.93 It is not, however, to be expected that the proportion of farm workers will remain constant. In the United States this proportion has steadily fallen. Of every thousand males in all occupations 483 were engaged in agricultural pursuits in 1880 as compared with only 358 in 1910.94 But despite this relative decline agriculture did not become less productive. More horses and more agricultural machinery were used, and fewer persons were able to perform the same amount of work.

What is more significant than the number of persons employed is the amount of land available for agriculture. Until 1900 we were in the extensive period of American farming, during which an increase in the population was met by an increased farm acreage. From 1850 to 1900 our population increased from 23 to 76 millions, but our farm area increased almost as fast and the improved farm area even faster.95 During the decade ending 1910, however, a strong pressure of population upon American agriculture became obvious. In these ten years the country's population increased 21 per cent. while the total farm area increased only 4.8 per cent.96 While 16,000,000 people were added to the population the increase in farm area was equal only to what would accommodate an additional three and a half million people. It is no longer easy to stretch the farm area and to a large extent our farms must grow by the increase of the improved at the expense of the unimproved acres.97

Actually the per capita agricultural production in 1909 (the year covered by the census of 1910) was less than that of a decade before. Though the crops in the latter year were far higher in value, the increase in the quantity of product was only 10 per cent., as compared with an increase in population of 21 per cent.98 Had the American people consumed all the American product in both years, they would have been obliged to cut down their ration by about one-tenth;99 instead there was a vast diminution of exports. The growing population began to consume the agricultural products formerly exported. The question is therefore pertinent whether it will be possible for us indefinitely to feed from our own fields our increasing millions or whether we shall be forced to depend increasingly for food on outside sources and to secure this food by a development of our export trade in manufactured products. To many this question will seem to answer itself. It is commonly assumed that there are almost no limits to our possible agricultural production and therefore to our desirable increase of population. France is almost self-sufficing with a population of 189.5 to the square mile; when the United States (continental area) has an equally dense population we may maintain a population of five or six hundred millions. We need merely take up new lands and cultivate more intensively.

The opportunities for the further development of American agriculture, however, while undoubtedly great, are not immeasurable. At present we have some 879,000,000 acres in farms, of which 478,000,000 (or 25.1 per cent. of our total land area) are improved.100 But of the rest of our area much is not useful. Some 465,000,000 acres in the western part of the country have an annual precipitation of fifteen inches or less, and of these acres, not over 30,000,000 could be profitably irrigated at present prices of farm products, labour, land and capital. This addition of 30,000,000 acres would increase our present improved area by less than seven per cent. Besides the permanently arid acres, moreover, there is other unusable land in national forests, roads, cities and in swamps and over-flow lands difficult to reclaim. With these deductions made, we have only 1,252,000,000 acres as the maximum farm area of the future. This is 31.1 per cent. greater than the present farm area.101

It is true that a larger part of the farm area can be cultivated. From 1900 to 1910 the area of improved lands increased 15.4 per cent. If this rate of increase could continue there would be about one billion acres improved by 1960, and this seems to be the absolutely outside upper limit. But this does not mean that a billion acres could be improved and cultivated at the same cost per acre as at present. The improved lands would require a constantly increasing amount of capital and labour to secure returns equal to those which the farmer now obtains.

Similarly there are limits to the extent to which we can afford to divide up our land into smaller farms in order to secure a larger production per acre. Intensive cultivation is an alluring phrase but in the production of many staple crops intensive cultivation is dear cultivation. The movement in progressive agricultural communities is towards a moderately large farm. It is the smaller farms (of from 20 to 99 acres) that the boys and girls leave most rapidly. "The farm management studies," writes Mr. Eugene Merritt of the U. S. Department of Agriculture102 "indicate that on these small-sized farms, man labour, horse labour, and agricultural machinery cannot be used efficiently. In other words, economic competition is eliminating the unprofitable sized farms."103

The pressure of agricultural population upon a given farm area results either in the growth of an inefficient small scale production or of a large rural proletariat. Both are undesirable and neither will permit farming on as cheap a scale as at present. The actual trend to-day in districts where cereals are raised is towards larger farms (of 150 to 300 acres), and this tendency is likely to be increased by the introduction of cheap tractor engines, which now seems to impend. There is doubtless a considerable opportunity in the United States for an improvement in the average product per acre even though the increase in the area of cultivation constantly brings in land of decreasing fertility. If in the course of forty or fifty years we can increase the area under cultivation by fifty per cent. and the product per acre by 20 per cent. we shall have an increase in product of 80 per cent., which would provide for an increase in the population of 80,000,000 without any greater leaning upon foreign resources than to-day.104

We are likely, however, to lean upon certain foreign resources, and more especially upon Canada and the Caribbean countries. Whatever its political allegiance Canada is and will probably remain economically a part of the United States. The Iowa farmers, who sold out their home farms to buy cheaper land in Canada, unconsciously illustrated the closeness of this economic bond. We may draw upon Canadian wheat, fish, lumber and iron ore almost exactly as though the territory were our own. It is Canada's interest to sell to us and buy from us, and even preferential duties cannot entirely overcome our immense geographical advantage over Europe. Similarly we shall draw upon the Caribbean countries, whether or not we have a political union, for vast quantities of tropical food stuffs.

Whatever our importation of food an increase in agricultural efficiency is also probable. We have already improved and cheapened our farm machinery and have disseminated agricultural education and information. But much progress remains to be made. We can use better seeds, raise better crops and cattle, and work more co-operatively instead of individualistically. Our transportation system can be better co-ordinated with our agriculture, so that food, now wasted because it will not pay the freight, can be brought to market.105 A better knowledge of the science of farming would greatly increase our agricultural production. If our country roads were improved, if we varied our crops more intelligently, if we refrained from impoverishing our soils, if we drained some tracts and irrigated others, we should speedily discover a vast increase in our agricultural productiveness, a larger return to the farmers, a greater home demand for manufactured products, and a better opportunity for capital at home. If by putting more capital and intelligence upon our farms, we were to add several billions to the value of their output, we should broaden the base of our whole economic life, enlarge the volume of our non-competitive exports, and in the end approximate conditions that would make for a peaceful foreign policy and for the promotion of an economic internationalism.

But though we widen our agricultural base, our population unless its rate of progress is checked, will eventually, and perhaps soon, overtake any extension.106 Though we increase agricultural knowledge and substitute mechanical for animal power and gasoline for hay, the law of diminishing returns will remain. Ten men cannot secure as large a per capita product from a given area as five, or twenty as large as ten. But if our population were to maintain its present geometrical increase we should have 200,000,000 inhabitants in 1953 and, to assume the almost impossible, 400,000,000 in 1990. Long before the latter figure could be reached there would be positive and preventive checks to further growth, but if these checks were late in being applied, there would come increased inequality, misery and economic uncertainty, and an enhanced liability to war.

For us as for other nations a too rapid increase in population spells this constant danger of war. Our farms cannot absorb more than a certain proportion of our population without causing lowered wages and increasing poverty, and we cannot expand our export trade without entering into the range of international conflict. While therefore an improved agriculture with high food prices will permit of an increase in our population, it is advantageous that that increase does not proceed too rapidly. If we grow to two hundred millions in seventy-five or one hundred years instead of in thirty-seven, we shall still be strong enough to protect our present territories and shall have less occasion to fight for new.

Fortunately our rate of population increase, despite immigration, is steadily decreasing. In the decade ending 1860 our population increased 35.6 per cent., in the period 1860 to 1879 at an average decennial rate of 26.3 per cent., and in the three following decades 25.5 per cent., 20.7 per cent. and 21.1 per cent respectively. The fall in our natural increase was even greater. While the death rate has declined107 the birth rate has fallen off even more rapidly. Our birth statistics are inadequate, but we can gain some idea of this decline by comparing the number of children under 5 years of age living at each census year with the number of women between the ages of 16 to 44 inclusive. In 1800 there were 976 children per 1,000 women in these ages; in 1830, 877; in 1860, 714; in 1890, 554; in 1910, 508.108

For a number of decades a continuation in this falling off in the birth rate is probable. It is rendered necessary by the fall in the death rate and possible by the fact that birth has ceased to be a mere physiological accident and is coming under human control. "The most important factor in the change," says Dr. John Shaw Billings, "is the deliberate and voluntary avoidance or prevention of child-bearing on the part of a steadily increasing number of married people who prefer to have but few children."109 The spreading of the knowledge of birth control and the increasing financial burden of children in an urbanised society composed of economically ambitious people will probably prevent our population from ever again increasing as rapidly as it did half a century ago.110

In the meanwhile our immigration (until the outbreak of the present war) continued to increase. In the ten years ending June 30, 1914, over ten million immigrant aliens arrived in the United States, of whom approximately seven millions remained. Nor has the high point in immigration been surely attained. The European population increases so rapidly that the excess of births over deaths is between three and four times the entire emigration. Immigration tends to flow from countries where the pressure of population is greater to countries like the United States, where the pressure is less. Unless there is restriction we may witness within the next decades a new vast increase in immigration, which will result in a rapid growth of our population and a resulting pressure upon our agricultural (and other natural) resources, that will vastly increase the intensity and bitterness of our competition for the world's markets and the world's investment opportunities.

By thus increasing our agricultural product, and developing our home market and our less directly competitive industries and by slackening an increase in our population, which would otherwise force us into foreign adventures, we tend to approach a balanced economic system and a parallel growth of extractive and manufacturing industries. Such a dependence in the main on home resources for the nation's primal needs is in the circumstances the best preventive of an imperialistic policy that might lead to war. But there is an even closer-lying incentive to imperialism and war. A nation may have a sufficiently wide base and an efficient industrial development but because of internal economic mal-adjustments may be driven into imperialistic courses. A policy not dictated by national needs may be forced upon the nation by the necessities and ambitions of its dominating class.

CHAPTER XIV

AN ANTIDOTE TO IMPERIALISM

A nation, though economically complete, in the sense that it could, if it desired, maintain its population upon its own resources may yet be lured into an imperialistic and warlike policy. Just as political disintegration leads to internal conflicts, disorders and finally foreign intervention, so an economic disequilibrium, by placing the interests of certain classes within the arena of international friction may evoke a struggle, which can have no other issue than war.

This is exactly the effect, for example, of a gross inequality of wealth and income. Such an inequality means that multi-millionaires, gaining far more than they can spend, are impelled to invest their surplus funds in outside ventures. The capital that can be profitably absorbed by industries manufacturing for home consumption depends upon the ability of the population to purchase food, clothes, houses, furniture, watches, and automobiles. If the population cannot or will not increase purchases at a rate commensurate with the increase of national savings, a vast capital must either be diverted to manufacturing for the export trade or must itself be exported. Neither of these deflections is in itself bad; in moderation, both are good. There is, however, a certain degree of intensity of competition for foreign trade and investment which means industrial war and the danger of military war. The wider the interval between national savings and national consumption, the more powerful and dangerous is this expulsive tendency of capital.

Such a tendency may arise in a country in which, despite an equality in wealth, the national savings are excessive, but the greatest danger is in countries in which the returns to capital, rent and business enterprise are large and the returns to labour small. The big profits come from the manufacture of articles of common use, and the home demand for such articles is limited by the consuming capacity of poor men. The surplus capital must therefore find a vent, and the larger this surplus capital, the more venturesome it grows and the more insistently it demands that the state back up its enterprises.

We may trace this development in the recent history of Great Britain. Though British wages rose during the half century ending in 1900, the consuming capacity of the masses was not sufficient to employ the rapidly expanding capital. British capital went everywhere; among other places to the Transvaal. There was more money in "Kaffirs" than in making socks for the British artisan, and if international friction resulted from this capital export, it was all the better, or at least none the worse, for the financiers. The men who controlled the Rand mines knew when shares were to rise and when they were to fall, and profited by their knowledge. Nor were war preparations disadvantageous. An extra Dreadnought helped British capital more than would the expenditure of the cost of such a vessel in increasing the wages of school teachers. Yet it was because school teachers and other wage-earners in Britain, as in many other countries, were poorly paid, that the accumulating capital of the nations was forced increasingly into foreign lands and into imperialistic ventures. Morocco, Egypt, Korea and Manchuria offered larger rewards than did the highly competitive businesses which depended on the custom of French, English and Russian peasants or wage-earners. The inequality in the distribution of wealth proved to be a stimulus to imperialistic competition.

Those who are satisfied with things as they are never tire of speaking of this distribution of wealth as an immutable thing, protected by economic laws more potent than legislative enactments. They insist that law cannot control the expansion of capital or the distribution of wealth. But our whole system of distribution is based on law. If England had not preserved entail and primogeniture, if France had not decreed the equal inheritance by all children, if the United States had not adopted a liberal land policy, the distribution of wealth in each of these countries would have been far different. Within wide limits the economic course of the nation can be controlled.

Such a peaceful programme for creating a better distribution of wealth, a wider consumption and therefore a larger employment of capital in industries for home consumption has the added advantage that it is a policy in complete harmony with the interests of great sections of the population. The average man desires peace feebly; he does not think of it day and night and is not willing to fight for it. But he is willing to fight for things which actually contribute more towards peace than do arbitration treaties. The demand of the workman for higher wages, shorter hours and better conditions is, whether the wage-earner knows it or not, a demand for international peace. Progressive income and inheritance taxes, the regulation of railroads and industrial corporations, the conservation of natural resources are all opposed to an imperialistic policy leading to war. In short the entire democratic struggle against the narrow concentration of wealth, by increasing the demand for capital within the country, tends to preserve us from a meddlesome, domineering, dangerous imperialism.

To increase the consumption of the masses of our people is easier for us than for Germany or England because of our wider economic base, our bulk, territory and immense potential wealth. To increase wages, we need not, like the crowded countries of western Europe, acquire new resources beyond our borders. We already have a place in the sun, and out of our waste can extract more than can Germany or France out of colonies for which they must fight. It is easier for us to increase industrial rewards because we now waste more in our unregulated scramble for wealth than Germany gains in her scientific, economical use of her smaller resources. Compared to industrial Germany we are a spendthrift nation. Had Germany our resources and numbers, she would be peaceful and rich; were we obliged to live on her narrow territory, we should be bellicose and impoverished.

Not that Germany has solved the whole problem; all she has learned is to be efficient. Her early poverty taught her to make a little go a great way, to combine the peasant's industry and parsimony with the far-flung plans of the business organiser. So capably has she done this that living conditions have improved as her population has increased. Where all nations have as yet failed, however, is in the distribution of the industrial product. In the end a gross inequality of wealth and income, as we find it in all developed countries, is another form of waste. It means fewer economic satisfactions, less true value. A few billion dollars added to the income of twenty thousand families is of less utility than when distributed among twenty millions. Inequality of wealth, moreover, involves low wages, over-work, child labour, insecurity, unemployment, preventable disease, premature death, in short, a bad economy. It also involves an inability on the part of the masses to consume the product of industries in which the wealthy invest.

The economic inequality in the United States does not as yet present the same imminent dangers as in certain European countries. Wealth, it is true, is most unevenly distributed,111 but while incomes are also very unequal,112 the rate of wages113 and the returns to farmers and to small business men are far greater than in the industrial countries of Europe. Our statistics of consumption reveal an immense and constantly increasing demand for all kinds of articles and services. As compared with England or Germany the distribution of income in the United States permits a high standard of living and creates a vast demand for the use of capital in industries for home consumption.

There is, however, a danger that these conditions may grow worse. An unrestricted growth of the population either through natural increase or immigration would tend to increase monopoly profits and reduce real wages, thus accentuating the inequality of distribution and forcing an enormous surplus capital to be devoted to foreign trade and foreign investments. On the other hand there is an opportunity to improve our conditions. There is still a wide margin for a real increase in wages, for shorter hours, better labour conditions, improved education, improved recreational facilities, and in general a deflection of a large part of the national dividend to the improvement of the conditions of life of the whole population.

For a long time Americans ignored the necessity of any such social policy. We were almost as wasteful of our human as of our physical resources. From birth to burial we regarded our men and women as human accidents, who died or lived, languished or grew great, as circumstances decreed. Though in recent decades we have approached to a keener sense of collective national responsibility, we still suffer not only from a high infantile death-rate but also from a disastrous neglect of children who survive. Our educational system is still rudimentary, conventional, and ill adapted to our economic needs. There is little industrial education, less vocational guidance, and almost no care at all for the adjustment of the educational system to the later needs of the children. Millions of children, who in the next generation are to decide questions of war or peace, are growing up, anemic, underfed, intellectually sterile, and without morale, firmness or strength. Our slums, our low wages, our evil conditions in mines and sweat-shops unite to give us the tramp, the corner loafer, the exploiter of vice, the criminal. Such conditions are in every sense dangerous to our peace as also to our well-being. They mean a low economic efficiency, a restricted consumption, a barrier to the proper capitalisation of our country. Apart from this, the corruption arising out of such conditions menaces our national character. We hear praise to-day of the iron discipline of the German army, but we hear less of the discipline of the German school, factory system, social legislation, trade-union. If millions of Americans are shiftless, shuffling, undisciplined and only vaguely and crudely patriotic, the cause is to be found in our neglect of the lessons of modern social life.

To state these conditions of human waste and exploitation is to suggest the remedies. All such remedies cost money, hundreds of millions. There is no progress without higher taxes, better spent, and we shall not advance except by the path of a vast increase in collective expenditure for common purposes. In the end, of course, such improvements will pay for themselves. If we spent fifty millions a year upon agricultural education, we could easily reimburse ourselves out of our increased production. We spend over five hundred million dollars annually upon public elementary and secondary education, a sum much greater than that spent in any other country. If, however, we could efficiently organise our school system, we could more profitably spend three times as much. There are many other chances for the ultimately profitable investment of our capital upon agencies which make for a more intelligent, active, industrious and self-disciplined population.