al developments in the United States formed the
groundwork of these gloomy prophecies. We had just passed through a
commercial depression, during which prices and interest rates fell and
great numbers of workers were left unemployed. These facts were
exploited by political leaders and industrial magnates, who thought in
terms of the subordination of American foreign policy to the needs of
big business. It is not surprising therefore that they became infected
with the new imperialism, which in Europe had been growing steadily for
over fifteen years, and that they came to the conclusion that America
could not hold hands off while the markets and investment fields of the
world were divided up among her rivals.

"The United States," wrote Charles A. Conant, one of the intellectual
leaders of this movement (in 1898), "cannot afford to adhere to a
policy of isolation while other nations are reaching out for the
command of new markets. The United States are still large users of
foreign capital, but American investors are not willing to see the
return upon their investments reduced to the European level. Interest
rates have greatly declined here within the last {49} five years. New
markets and new opportunities for investment must be found if surplus
capital is to be profitably employed."

Like so many of the pamphleteers of 1898, Mr. Conant was convinced that
imperialism offered the only cure "for the enormous congestion of
capital." No civilised state, he contended, would accept the doctrine
that saving should be abandoned. And while human desires were
expansible, he doubted whether the demand for goods could possibly
increase with sufficient rapidity to absorb the new productive
capacities of the nation. "There has never been a time," he writes,
"when the proportion of capital to be absorbed has been so great in
proportion to possible new demands. Means for building more bicycle
factories than are needed, and for laying more electric railways than
are able to pay dividends, have been taken out of current savings
within the last few years, without producing any marked effect upon
their amount and without doing more, at the most, than to stay the
downward course of the rate of interest."

It therefore follows conclusively that the American conquest of markets
and fields for investment must go on. The method of such a conquest is
of little importance. "In pointing out," he says, "the necessity that
the United Sta