The document, according to the German
commentators is falsely dated.

[8] French Yellow Book, No. 1. Annexe I.

{151}

CHAPTER XII

THE AMERICAN DECISION

We have seen how in Europe the outward expansion, which leads to
international friction and war, has been due to deep-lying economic
motives acting on ordinarily peace-loving populations. We have seen
how national interest, blended with class interest, has distorted this
expansion and has turned a wholesome process of world-development into
a reckless scramble for territory and a perpetually latent warfare.
Lastly we have seen how in all countries broad sections of the
population have been sickened by the stupid brutality and imminent
peril of this unenlightened nationalic competition and have groped for
some plan by which commerce might expand and industry grow without the
nations going to war.

Such a plan must involve a basis of agreement, if not a community of
interest, among nations requiring economic security and industrial
growth. The choice does not lie between national expansion and
contraction but between an expansion which ranges the nations in
hostile camps and one which affords more equal opportunities of
development to all competing powers. For each nation it is a choice
between a headlong national aggrandisement, which takes no account of
the needs and ambitions of other powers and the development of an
economic world system, in which the industrial growth of one nation
does not mean the stagnation or destruction of its neighbours.

Like the nations of Europe, the United States is faced {152} with the
necessity of making this decision. The problem presents itself less
clearly to us, since in the past we have largely expanded within; we
have been able to grow by a more intensive utilisation of what was
already conceded to us instead of spreading out into regions where
international competition was intense. Those classes which in other
countries are strongly driven by economic interest towards imperialism
were in America otherwise occupied. But to-day we are beginning to
overflow our boundaries, and we tend already to do instinctively what
in the future we may do of set purpose. The men who wish to use army
and navy to obtain American concessions in Mexico, South America and
China are not distantly related to the imperialists of Germany, who
believed that Kiau-chau was a fair exchange for two dead missionaries,
or to those of Grea