angerous 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 {190}
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,[1] but while incomes are also
very unequal,[2] the rate of wages[3] 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 Engla