It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or to invest capital in it, and doubtless the United States can find some vent for their surplus goods and capital in European countries. But these countries are for the most part able to make provision for themselves: most of them have erected tariffs against manufacturing imports, and even Great Britain is being urged to defend herself by reverting to Protection. The big American manufacturers and financiers will be compelled to look to China and the Pacific and to South America for their most profitable chances; Protectionists by principle and practice, they will insist upon getting as close a monopoly of these markets as they can secure, and the competition of Germany, England, and other trading nations will drive them to the establishment of special political relations with the markets they most prize. Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii are but the hors d’œuvre to whet an appetite for an ampler banquet. Moreover, the powerful hold upon politics which these industrial and financial magnates possess forms a separate stimulus, which; as we have shown, is operative in Great Britain and elsewhere; the public expenditure in pursuit of an imperial career will be a separate immense source of profit to these men, as financiers negotiating loans, shipbuilders and owners handling subsidies, contractors and manufacturers of armaments and other imperialist appliances.
The suddenness of this political revolution is due to the rapid manifestation of the need. During a period of ten years the United States has nearly trebled the value of its manufacturing export trade, and, if the rate of progress of the last few years continues, within this decade it will overtake our more slowly advancing export trade, and stand first in the list of manufacture-exporting nations. [23]
This is the avowed ambition, and no idle one, of the keenest business men of America; and with the natural resources, the labour and the