IMPERIALISM.
BY THE HON. CARL SCHURZ.
It is remarkable how the moral sense as
well as the reasoning faculties of persons who
are otherwise quite upright and judicious, may
sometimes become obscured or confused by the
influence of those violent currents of opinion
which, in popular parlance, we call “crazes.”
Shortly after the close of our Civil War the
proposition was advanced that the national
bonds should be paid off in depreciated
greenbacks; and as this idea seemed to take
hold of the popular mind, persons, who in
their private dealings were scrupulously honest,
would convince themselves, and try to
convince others, that a way of paying debts which,
between man and man they would have
abhorred as utterly knavish, would be perfectly
just if adopted by the Government as to its
bond creditors, We had the same experience
during the fiat-money craze in the seventies,
before the resumption of specie payments, and
again later, during the silver craze. A similar
phenomenon we have had occasion to observe
since the day of Dewey's brilliant victory in
Manila harbor, which seemed to put in our
power a group of several hundred islands with
a population of over 8,000,000 souls, about
9,000 miles away from our western coast, thus
giving us an important position in those distant
seas, in which the colonizing Powers of Europe
are busily maneuvering for predominance.
This was to us a new sensation, apparently sufficient to unsettle in the minds of many otherwise sober and well-balanced persons, not only all their old principles of policy, but even their sense of honor. The word went forth that the nation had suddenly “come to consciousness”; that the United States must accept the “new mission”; that it is no longer the mere “United States of America,” but “Imperial America”; that we already have “Asiatic and West Indian possessions,” which we must keep, that our “destiny” points to expansion, and so forth ad infinitum. I copy all these exclamatory expressions from an editorial in The Independent, where they appear with the ingenuousness of a fresh enthusiasm.
When we inquire into the real meaning of these more or less ecstatic outbursts with due soberness, we find that this new “mission” or “destiny” commands us to have or to get outside colonies—not as if our population had become too crowded in our present boundaries, for our large country is but thinly peopled; nor as if we found the resources of our country too scanty to keep our people profitably employed, for our home resources are not only not fully developed but not even fully explored; nor as if we needed outside possessions for our foreign commerce, for we are still very far from fully supplying the foreign markets open to us; but we must have colonies, simply because we now have an opportunity for getting some, no matter whether we get them honorably, or whether their possession will be good for us when we have them.
