A Letter to Uncle Sam

SIR: —

That was a day of grief for your pretensions to the Monroe Doctrine when you set your feet on another hemisphere than yours. Somehow or other the world had got it into its head that the core of the Monroe Doctrine was in your keeping out of the other half of the world, and keeping the other half of the world out of this. When you placed one foot on the other hemisphere, you so far loosened your footing on this. Whatever strength you had in reason and equity in preaching that Monroe creed, you lost when you began to practice another doctrine. Even before that happened there was not a European power that had the slightest respect for your pretension to the right to police half a hemisphere, to keep the rest of the world out when you had no intention of moving in. There is less evidence to-day that the Kaiser intends to surrender, to this pretension of yours, the last chance the world has to offer him of giving the magnificent people over whom he rules the expanding room he and they consider their natural right and their ultimate necessity. I have seen nothing to warrant your counting on the chance of the German people’s playing the rôle of oxen to you in the part of that ancient and yellow scion of the Canidœ which, if the historian has accurately chronicled the episode, forbade to others with much asperity and bad manners the contents of a certain manger for which he had neither the inclination nor capacity.

It is sufficiently clear to any one whose eyesight is still intact, that the policy of Pan-Germanism is Kaiser Wilhelm’s answer to the elemental interrogation of the twentieth century, and that South Brazil is the only direction in which he will not meet with opposition from Europe. The time has come when you must reconsider the whole question of the Monroe Doctrine. If you still champion it, you will have to fight for it. That is one of the propositions you must lay down as fundamental. In doing this you should understand that your alternative is Pan-Teutonism or Pan-Japan.

This famous doctrine was the clearcut and definite expression of the sense of American obligation toward the protection of the ideals and institutions for which the nation then stood, but for which it stands no longer. If you are not an unintelligent and recreant steward you will evolve a doctrine of Pan-Americanism which will express as faithfully our twentieth-century obligations toward those selfsame areas of the Western hemisphere.

You have been a notorious phrasemonger and doctrinaire. Your loyalty to a paragraph of ancient and noble lineage would entitle it in a better cause to the dignity of patriotism. But it is not a paragraph you want to save today. It is the future of the Germanic race, and your tenacity of opinion will serve us to better purpose if you can learn how to discard a doctrine when it has ceased to be true.

Sir, my first proposition is that there is not a ‘Republic’ or a civilization south of the Equator on this hemisphere which is so far superior to the German Empire and its religion and its educational system and its intelligence and its moral ideals, as to justify a peaceable nation like ours in waging war — perhaps lighting the conflagration of world-war — with a nation like Germany. It is not that we should be smashed, that would be inevitable. But to do you justice, I do not think that would deter you if you wanted to fight. But when the Monroe Doctrine was promulgated it was a comparatively simple matter to go to war. To-day it is a matter of the gravest responsibility.

This consideration alone should modify the Monroe Doctrine. As to your own interests, your blessed Congress has spent its time on mouthing the tariff and has not considered them. It has lost your chance. Southern South America is nearer to Europe than it is to New York. Even then, if we are to consider the Germans as neighbors less desirable than the present inhabitants of Latin America, which God forbid, they would be farther away than they were before. That argument will not serve. The Monroe Doctrine was aimed primarily against a possible coalition which might effect Roman Catholic predominance; secondarily, it has secured republican forms of government without the spirit of freedom or the blessings of democracy.

I want to know why races of blood kin, and what is as important, spiritual kin, should go to war to play into the hands of an alien race, with its sinister movements and its devouring ambitions, which have set themselves toward Australia and South America, a race which if necessary would not hesitate to destroy us all, and all we have built up of a Christian civilization in two thousand years. It is not a question of Germany, but it is a choice between German and Asiatic civilization’s ruling the Southern half of this hemisphere.

Your people and John Bull’s and Unser Fritz’s belong together. We are all Teutons. We are brethren. To wage a war with our blood-cousins for the stranger battering at our gates would be an unnecessary, which is the worst of all crimes. It would be especially aggravated by the fact that such a war would be waged on an issue which, so far as the territory in question is concerned, has lost its meaning. You Golden Rule Diplomat, are you afraid to do a thing which is both the generous and rational thing, because the differing circumstances of the last century demanded something else?

Let us have a new Pan-Germanism. Let our race get together. It is for you, to take the lead. You would have to discard a notion which has served its time. You would have to look ahead a hundred years and not back a hundred years. But it is the privilege of a statesman to prepare for the future. He does not prepare for the past. The past is gone. That part of it survives which helps or hinders the present and coming races of men. If you are willing to fight Germany for a people south of the Equator who hate you more royally than they do any other on earth, and who consider your assertions as insolent infringements on their rights, you are perilously near to being a sentimental old idiot. If you are willing to fight Germany because you are unwilling to see the establishment of a political system where life and property are safe, over a ‘ Republican ’ area of chronic revolution and bloodshed, you are a blind old Pharisee, and you ought to spend the rest of your days in the contemplation of the difference between anise and cummin. If you, who owe so much to the German in this your own fair land, in the civilization they have brought, here, in the sturdy and noble qualities they have grafted on your stock, in the thorough and decent qualities they have added to your institutions, in the heroism with which they have shed their blood in the cause of freedom, from Steuben to the present day; if you still want to fight these splendid people, — who want to find expanding room as you once sought and found expanding room, — in order to bolster and uphold the wretched travesty of a tyrannous dictatorship masquerading as a paper republic, Sir, you have forfeited the world’s respect; you have not adjusted yourself to the new day; you are an inadequate steward; you are a relic of the nineteenth century, and you will richly deserve the thrashing you will surely receive.

This is a question of race and blood. It is not a question of an ancient fetich. You must look hard at reality. You claim to be a sentimentalist. There are higher sentiments than political doctrines, if those doctrines have lost their meaning. ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ When the Monroe Doctrine was launched, it was a vital principle. Since that time it has been Europe and America which have been trading together, not North and South America. It has been Europe and America which have been growing together. Our vast dominions have been peopled by Europeans, not by South Americans; our bench-mates, our shop-mates, our associates and friends, and sometimes our helpmates, have been those who have come to us from Europe, and not South America. These are our brethren. We have been reading about Europe, and they have been reading about us. We have been getting together. Europe itself is revolutionized because of this vast intercommunication, and is more or less Americanized, and not always for the better. There are monarchies in Europe more democratic than the Republic of the United States. Moreover, a monarchy transplanted to American soil could not possibly remain a monarchy for a quarter of a century. There is not one reason why Germany should not colonize South Brazil if she wants to. But there is every reason in the range of modern politics why she should, and why the United States should meet her half way.

I solemnly propose that you take the lead in the advocacy of the new PanGermanism. It is time the German races got together. It is time the white races got together. I have no brief for Germany as against France or any other nation. I am suggesting a policy to you, which is not only in the line of least resistance, but reaches out toward the greatest synthesis. There is a chance for you to redeem yourself. The future of South America is second only in importance to the future of our own country. The question is likely to be settled by you pretty soon as to whether South America is to be finally and predominantly Teutonic or Oriental, whether these vast and all but untouched resources shall minister to races of our own blood and ideals and religion, or whether they shall belong to and advance an unknown and perhaps impossible civilization. You have only to cast your eye on Formosa and Korea and Manchuria to know at once what Japan would make of a South American Republic. You have only to look at the twenty millions of transplanted Germans here to guess what a garden they would make under the Southern Cross. They would have an efficient nation. They would have a nation rationally organized, and not the result of drift and the sport of chance. It would be conducted at the highest level of intelligence, and not at haphazard. While they would doubtless work for their own interests, they would work also for the solidarity of the great Teutonic family, which must be achieved by the German races on the Western Hemisphere.

Those dreams of future race-unity promised by the deliberations of the Hague Tribunal must result from kinship in race and institutions and ideals, based frankly on fair economic as well as political conventions. The rapid shaping of events is showing that there is no future for the unorganized peoples. There is no security for a land of unconsolidated and unavailable and unprotected resources. There are but a few great areas rich in the resources and raw materials of the soil left for the young and virile and ambitious nations. Before it is everlastingly too late, it is yet possible to arrange and apportion these areas justly and wisely, not only that war may be averted — world-war — but that the future of those blessed principles and ideals which brought you into being, and the nation over which you spread your wings, may be settled.

Webster’s Bunker Hill speech was delivered eighteen months after he had read in the Senate President Monroe’s famous message on that Doctrine which has since borne his name. The message and the circumstances were fresh in his mind when he said: ‘At this moment the dominion of European power in this continent, from the place where we stand to the South Pole, is annihilated forever.’ In those days the thought of China or Japan as a menace to the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon was so wild a dream as not to have been entertained probably by a single human being on this continent. Then, several of the countries of Europe were a real anxiety — perhaps menace. It was not so self-evident, then, that an invasion of even North America might not be fruitful. This doctrine has served its purpose well many a time since then, but the revolutions in worldgeography and world-politics which since have taken place have required a reëxamination of all our old politics and outlooks. The doctrine of the past is somewhat vague. That of the present is wholly inadequate in that it does not cover the twentieth-century situation. I do not know anywhere so unintelligent a situation in the politics of the world. If the doctrine is sound, you are a criminal negligent, for you have made no preparation worthy of a drunken fiddler to defend your pretensions. If the doctrine is not sound, you have been putting yourself in the position of an unpardonable bluffer, for you are advocating something you cannot successfully defend. As a matter of fact, it is wholly indefensible, morally and physically. In 1823 the United States was confronted with the danger that France might help Spain to recover her revolted colonies, and that Russia, which had acquired, not a foothold, but a principality on our continent, might further encroach upon our domain. France did not reëstablish Spain, and Russia in 1824 gave up her claim to the 51st parallel as her southern boundary and accepted 54° 40'.

Other nations have changed, are changing, their policies. Why not we? Did not Jefferson claim that every generation should have its own constitution? It is beyond contention that every generation should have its foreign policy. The success of Bismarck was mostly due to his flouting of logic when it disagreed with facts, and devoting himself lo the situation in hand with no shibboleths to defend. The success of the present Kaiser is due to the fact that he is big enough to know that even the immortal Bismarck had been outgrown by the Empire he had created, and that the time had come for a new policy and a new ideal.

To ignore the fact that Germany means to have South Brazil — already has South Brazil — and means to keep it, is to ignore German history and historians, German politics and economics, the German platform and press; in short, the every-day life and thought of the German people. And, Sir, if you ignore these, you lose.

You must understand that the issues of peace and war are involved in facts, not theories.

‘Talk of stubborn facts,’ says Crothers, ‘they are mere babes beside a stubborn theory.’ You will find out some day, and let us hope it will not be too late, that world-issues are not determined by the transcendental vagaries of an intellectual solipsism. These decide the affairs of ostriches, not rational men. When all else has been said and done, one cold, ugly, stubborn fact remains. The British Empire and the Monroe Doctrine are blocking the expansion of the German Empire. This Empire is spilling over and must have room. It has ordained that it shall have room. Neither the geographical position of the imprisoned empire of Germany, nor the plain requirements of her rapidly increasing people, are amenable to diplomatic obstruction or altruistic sentiment. Over on the Pacific we find exactly the same conditions. There is the same situation. But Japan has found a field of expansion on the continent of Asia. You have set up your sign, ‘Keep off the grass,’ on the only vacant places in the temperate zone left in the world. You have not had the foresight or the enterprise to occupy them. You have not even laid the foundations for occupation. Worse, you have not laid the foundations for that commercial expansion so dear to your heart. This is why I am sure it is because of your unintelligence, for in a matter of money-getting you are sure to do your best. That you have not established an adequate mercantile marine in South America is the final proof of your inability to manage world-affairs.

Sir, one cannot sit long in the galleries of Congress and come away with the respect for democratic institutions he took there with him. To a traveled and educated American patriot, his Congress is the most pathetic assembly in the world, and there is little courage in the reflection that it is a representative body. There are serious men there. There are serious questions debated there. A few. But they are in so sickly a minority as to destroy a rational hope of the survival of the republic. They have lost you your chance in the South American continent. And this is not the only chance they have lost for you. Your mercantile marine! Perhaps the least said the soonest mended.

The Monroe Doctrine is an anachronism south of the Equator. Not so, north. We shall have our hands full between the Equator and the Rio Grande. Perhaps we shall need the prestige of Germany in order to keep our own as far as the Equator. And all denials to the contrary, Japan is hob-nobbing with Mexico. You are quite sure she is not, are you? How do you know? Why? Has not Japan told you? Does not that settle it? You blessed old Saint! Of course you must trust Japan — and keep your powder dry. Japan proposes to make Mexico a base of supplies toward the protection of her interests on this continent. Those interests are from five to ten times as many Japanese soldiers on American and Canadian soil as constitute the whole American standing army. So that if Mexico persists in listening to the Japanese siren — we must take Mexico. It is more than probable that this will be our fate. Here we have interests which are paramount — vital. We must and will protect them. Almost the whole of continental Germany — indeed, all Europe — concedes that if we had a paramount interest in South America the Monroe Doctrine would be reasonable. The European powers cannot conceive of sentiment or altruism as having a rational place in the struggle of war or diplomacy or commerce. They stand on the principle that no power has a right to interfere where it has not tangible and real interests to defend. But between the Gulf and the Rio Grande and the Equator the sympathy and support of Europe would be with us.

At the present time we are, with our ancient doctrine, like the boy who got the worst of a trade and got whipped for it. The job of keeping the hornet’s nest of half a hemisphere in order has not resulted in our escape without a few swollen faces. We shall do well if we always get off so easily. In Australasia, South America, South Africa, and Canada, the advance of the white races means the retreat of the yellow; the advance of the yellow races into our empty spaces means the doom of the white. This movement back to the soil shall decide whether the civilization of these empty continents for another thousand years shall be white or yellow.

Is it not time to-day, and not tomorrow, for you to forget the tariff and ask yourself whether you have a mission? To look toward the fields of your future expansion? To plant, and help others to plant and nurture, our ideals and institutions on the empty continents of the world? It is not only a question of our grandchildren, and theirs, but of the occupation of the Americas from the Arctic Archipelago to the Terra del Fuego by the peoples and institutions of the Germanic race.

Here, Sir, is a fundamental proposition. The occupation and development of an empty continent will give the principle of commercial supremacy a new meaning. It will lend to our armies and navies an aroma of patriotism. Coupled with such measures at home as will offer health, wealth, and happiness to the toiling millions in making them new nations on new soil, with the guarantee of the blessings of a Christian civilization, it will give a new significance to that which is now a purely selfish plan of aggrandizement, and one which points to national decay.

Anglo-Saxon statesmen worthy the name should see that their policies point toward filling the temperate zones of the Southern continent with Teutons, if not with Anglo-Saxons. Great Britain has more lands than she can fill or till. She has enough. Let Germany move into South America. If she moves in, it will never be filled by the Chinese or Japanese. The American policy is no longer rational if it excludes from South America a government superior to any there; if it excludes a people more efficient than any there; if it excludes ideals and institutions better than any there.

The future purpose and policy of the United States should be to encourage the development of the mines and forests and farms of the emptier spaces of the world, rather than the building of mills and machinery to make more shiploads of goods, probably half the world’s output of which is worse than useless economically to the world. The present development of industrialism is artificial. Its products appeal to many new and unwholesome and artificial tastes. It has created artificial men and women. It has multiplied artificial and deadly conditions. This means that if we turn our faces toward normal and healthy occupations we must turn them away from commercial aggrandizement in the Orient, and toward the undeveloped natural resources of the Southern continent. This — southward and not westward — is the direction of a rational expansion with a future. Toward this Southland lies American opportunity— not in territorial aggrandizement, but in the development of natural wealth. ‘We wish for no victories but those of peace; for no territory except our own,’ said Mr. Root at Rio Janeiro.

What we are unable to do toward the habilitation of the South American continent, on the terms of the world’s highest and best civilization, we cannot — must not — prevent others from doing. It is of vital importance to us what peoples in the unrolled future shall till those empty fields, dig those potential mines, utilize those immeasurable forests. No less than much of the best welfare of the future races of the world depends upon your attitude just now, what you determine just now, as to what race and what civilization and what religion shall prevail on that continent, as large as ours.

Sir, the economic sign-posts of the twentieth century point portentously to Japan and Germany, as things now stand and ought to stand no longer, as the natural, logical, inevitable antagonists of Anglo-Saxon predominance. Has it ever occurred to you that there might be a better predominance? Be that as it may, everything you possess outside the forty-eight States in this Union is threatened by these adversaries. Theories will not decide their policies. Sentiments will not move their statesmen. They will be moved by economic necessity, or by their ideas of their ultimate need. Whatever may be the lofty ideals toward which international statecraft is moving, it has arrived at none which will allow an intelligent people to hold its own on the sufferance of any other power, or which will justify a nation keeping her signboards up with her fences down.

Sir, the Anglo-Saxon predominance of the world is doomed. Dies Irae lies not very far away. It is doomed because of the very impossibility of Anglo-Saxon thinking. Our theories of life will not allow us to get together. We are on the wrong track. Those nations have found the right who have learned both the spirit and the method of patriotism.

There is only one thing left which can save Anglo-Saxondom, and that is to establish Pan-Teutonism. AngloSaxondom is not big enough to hold the world together any more, since the awakening of Asia. It will take a bigger combination. It is still time for the safeguarding of the Teutonic predominance. It can be done if you and John Bull and Unser Fritz have sense enough to get together. For do not forget that Japan has got together. Germany has got together. When any great race has a white heat of patriotism of sufficient intensity to weld a nation, sit up and take notice: something is going to happen to the equilibrium of the world.

Thrice blessed be you — and we — in this turning-point of history, if you can find the intelligence to do the great big obvious thing.

I have said that the two great world-movements of to-day are those of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Japan. The English-speaking races have no world-movement, no national ideal and mission, no patriotic renaissance. They have had theirs. They have none to-day. Besides Germany and Japan there are two other universal awakenings. They are Pan-Islam and new China. These must be reckoned with later. Woe to Western civilization if we, at least the Teutonic nations, do not reckon with them together.

The white races must stand together or go to the wall.

The first step is the consolidation of the British Empire.

The second step is the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon race.

The third step is the realization of the new Pan-Teutonism.

The two great alternatives are PanTeutonism and Pan-Japan.

As things are now the German Empire is a standing menace to the British Empire, and, through the Monroe Doctrine, to the United States. This situation is nothing less than monstrous. It is more than that; it is unnecessary. The German Empire has elected to preëmpt overseas empire for the unyielding necessities of her expanding national life. It is not as if that national life were not as potential in all things good and great as any to be found upon the planet today. Indeed, this gives the element of finality to the argument. The future of Germany lies athwart the pathway of the Monroe Doctrine and British imperial development. This great nation is blocked by British possessions and by American pretensions. Out of this situation Germany has developed a policy. That policy is that one of these must go. Which is it to be? Uncle Sam, it is for you to say, and how. You have the opportunity of a thousand years to be just and generous. You have an opportunity to say what the future of South America is to be. Shall it be white or yellow? Shall it be Christian or heathen?

Uncle, let us keep our eye on the main point.

That point is not the Monroe Doctrine, but the object for which that doctrine was once framed and was once adequate: the welfare of the people of this hemisphere, and therefore the welfare of the world.

If we lose sight of the welfare of the people in a creed or a phrase or a doctrine, we have taken leave of our intelligence and we have proved ourselves unfit for leadership.

We meet here in this one proposal a solution of two of the most far-reaching problems of the new century.

The first is the future of the civilization of the Western Hemisphere.

The second is, that in this and in no other proposition are the rational conditions of a peace of a hundred years. The proposed programme does not contain one irrational element. And the outcome would redound to the best good of Western civilization for all years to come. Mr. Carnegie has not money enough to buy peace. Boston sentimentalismus cannot conjure it. Mr. Taft’s plan may keep it for a week or ten days, and then, when any power wishes a new arrangement, there is nothing to prevent a new entente.

Peace is the absence of war.

War is an instrument of policy.

Policy is at least founded on, and subject to, the economic necessities of a nation, and that nation’s interpretation of those necessities.

There can be no peace between Teuton and Teuton, between German and Anglo-Saxon, on other terms than this. It is the Anglo-Saxon possession and Anglo-Saxon pretension which, according to all of Germany, are standing in the way of German development.

I propose that you propose a threecornered entente or a tripartite treaty.

Let the United States say to Germany that so far as active and hostile opposition by us is concerned, ‘ Welcome to South Brazil. Do not come nearer to us than you are now,’—provided that Germany says to Great Britain, ‘Sleep in peace. We have no further need of your possessions. Let us be friends’; and provided that Germany and Great Britain both say to the United States, ‘We guarantee your status quo and your paramount and indisputable interests on the American hemisphere from Canada to the Equator. Let us force the peace of the world.’