*Two papers read by Mr. Brooks Adams before the War College on July 30, 31, 1903.
Gentlemen:—I apprehend that, if we would essay to forecast the future, we must first turn to the past, and try to unravel the sequences of cause and effect which have created the present. Then, assuming that the same forces continue in operation, we may draw our inferences concerning coming events, always with the reservation that our conclusions must be more or less inaccurate, since with finite minds and limited knowledge we undertake to deal with the infinite.
At the outset we must establish a starting point. Last year when I had the honor to address the War College, I advanced the proposition that the chief motor of human action is the instinct of self-preservation, and that in the struggle for life, men follow the lines of least resistance. I have seen no reason to change this view. My next deduction was that, since few communities have ever been self-sufficing, men from the onset have been constrained to supply their necessities from without, either by purchase or by force, and that, to trade or rob, they have been obliged to travel. In travelling animals follow the easiest paths, which we call roads, and where roads have converged men have met and markets have grown up. Other things being equal, those markets have thriven best which have been safest and most accessible, and accordingly competition has led, from the remotest antiquity, to the development in market towns of some mechanism for caring for roads, for building and guarding walls, and for the maintenance of tribunals to decide disputes. Such a mechanism is, however, the embryo of a civil administration, and it is the presence of a civil administration which makes a capital city.
As energy gathers volume, highways stretch across continents, and the states which they traverse acquire a common interest in defending the traffic which feeds their markets and supports their population. Thus, economic systems are generated comprising several states, and when two or more such systems connect the same termini, war is apt to follow, for war is the sharpest form of economic competition.
Until very recently the two greatest economic systems which had ever existed were those which, having their bases in eastern Asia, had their terminus in North America, and their central markets in Europe. Of these, that which had London for its focus became predominant after Trafalgar and Waterloo, but previously war had raged between the two systems for upwards of a century, and I conceive that our country became moulded into the shape in which we know it through the struggle between these antagonists.
In this long conflict, the prize at stake in the western hemisphere was the valley of the Mississippi which is now, and must long continue to be, the reservoir toward which the streams traffic flow. Had either England or France stood alone, the United States could hardly have achieved independence, but would, apparently, have remained an appendage to an external seat of empire. Lying between the two combatants, the English population scattered along the Atlantic coast first acquired some degree of cohesion, and then, stretching out westward, gradually assumed the proportions of the greatest consolidated social mass which has, possibly, ever existed.
Centralization is at once a cause and an effect of the convergence of highways, and as the paths of least resistance are determined by the physical character of each country, the problem of centralization can only be approached through geography.
Before the invention of railways, water-courses offered less resistance than roads, and therefore rivers and canals were the favored channels of communication. The heart of the North American continent is traversed in all directions by the Mississippi and its tributaries, but for our purposes we may confine our attention to that portion of this region which is bounded by the main stream of the Mississippi and the Wisconsin, together forming an avenue north and south from Lake Michigan; and by the Ohio, the Alleghany and French Creek which, toward the north, are divided from Lake Erie by an easy portage. These rivers represent the legs of a vast triangle, having Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan for a base. This triangle, in the seventeenth century, could be best entered from Europe by way of the Saint Lawrence and Lake Ontario, or the Ottawa and Lake Huron; but whichever route was chosen, access to the interior could be closed by the power which held the Niagara River, Detroit and Mackinaw.
Supposing Canada and the Niagara River to be in the same hands, French Creek could be reached from Presque Isle, where Erie now stands, and once French Creek were gained the way lay open to Pittsburg. But whoever controlled the Alleghany to Pittsburg controlled the Ohio, and shut up the inhabitants beyond the mountains within the narrow strip which stretches from the crest of the Alleghanies to the sea. Nor was this the only advantage which fell to him who held the three keys to the Lakes. At the opposite end of Lake Erie, the Indian trail lay past Toledo up the Maumee to the Wabash, while by Green Bay and Fox River canoes could be carried to the Wisconsin, and from the Chicago to the Illinois.
The French very early grasped the geographical problem. In 1608 Champlain founded Quebec, and somewhat later Marquette and La Salle penetrated the depths of the wilderness. By 1750 the forces of Louis XV held the Saint Lawrence, the Niagara, the Ottawa, Detroit and the Maumee, Green Bay and Chicago. The French settled New Orleans in 1718.
Thus the French lay on the flank and rear of the English who had occupied the coast, and who were shut off from the west by a range of mountains whose outlets were held by the enemy. The only egress across easy country led by the Mohawk to Oswego, but the possession of Oswego availed little without Niagara.
Therefore the two rival economic systems, whose central markets were at London and Paris, and whose bases rested on the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, were brought into a predestined conflict for the only region which could serve as a terminus for the commerce flowing from China westward. As was inevitable also, the conflict broke out at the point where the main highways of the two systems converged. That is to say, at the junction of the Alleghany and the Monongahela.
The French starting from Quebec passed Niagara and descended the Alleghany to Pittsburg. The English leaving the Chesapeake ascended the Potomac to Cumberland and thence descended the valley of the nearest water-course to the Ohio.
Thus Virginia, being the base whence the lines of communication of the enemy could be best attacked, became the seat of English activity, and accordingly the energy of the American people found its most perfect expression in George Washington, a native of Virginia.
Gentlemen, I need not speak to you of Washington's mission to Duquesne, or of his first campaign and of its ending at Fort Necessity. You know better than I the story of the Seven Years War, of Braddock, of Louisburg and of Quebec. My province is confined to pointing out the influence which that struggle has had in moulding American civilization, and its possible bearing on the future. The incarnation of the war was George Washington, for he represented most perfectly the principle of American consolidation, and he fired the first shot in the struggle which, beginning at Great Meadows, ended only at Yorktown. The direct effect of that struggle was the adoption of the constitution of the United States, and it was due to Washington, more than to any other man, that that decisive step toward American centralization was taken.
I conceive that the Seven Years War and the War of the Revolution were parts of a whole. They cannot be dissociated. The victory of Great Britain in the first, determined the outbreak of the second. We can no longer rest content to attribute the policy of colonial taxation adopted by Parliament at the opening of the reign of George III, to the caprice of a minister or the perversity of a king. Nothing is accidental, and the advance of any nation is the resultant of forces. The moment the French were expelled from the valley of the Mississippi and this new region was throw open to English emigration, American consolidation became inevitable. American consolidation necessitated a more complex administrative system, a larger outlay, and augmented taxes. The, only point in doubt was whether the new empire in the West should exist as an appendage to the system centered in London, or whether it should be divided from the parent stem, and form the nucleus of a new organism.
Even before the treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended the Seven Years War, decentralization in America had broken down. You know how the scattered colonies had attempted concerted operations against the French and how lamentably they had failed. You know the waste of life and treasure entailed by incompetence, that the royal governors agreed in reporting the situation as intolerable, and that as early as 1754 Franklin advocated readjustment. No soldier suffered more from administrative imbecility than Washington, and when Pitt decided on assaulting the enemy's citadels he found himself driven to rely on English troops. Conditions did not improve with the advent of peace, for with peace fresh complications gathered. The terminus of the great international trade-route had indeed been conquered, and emigrants were swarming over the mountains, but the settlements on the Kentucky and the Ohio could only be reached from the Atlantic Colonies by roads crossing New York, Pennsylvania or Virginia. Forthwith it became apparent that if the core of the continent were to consolidate with these eastern communities it must be because access to the ocean was easier by paths leading through them than by the Mississippi, the Ottawa or the Saint Lawrence. Washington appreciated the situation and early pointed out the necessity for improved communication, since, as he observed, "the motives which predominate most in human affairs, are self-love and self-interest." No one doubted that roads could be built across New York to Niagara, or over the Virginian mountains, but for such roads to be serviceable, a central administration must have Jurisdiction capable of enforcing order, and maintaining equal Commercial rights. Washington stated the proposition with precision. He even went so far as to oppose efforts to open the Mississippi before the East had completed its highways, lest by so dog the country should be split in twain. In 1785 he wrote to Lee; "However singular the opinion may be, I cannot divest myself of it, that the navigation of the Mississippi, at this time, ought to be no object with us. On the contrary, until we have a little time allowed to open and make easy the ways between the Atlantic States and the western territory, the obstructions had better remain. There is nothing which binds one country or one State to another but interest."
The year before he had explained fully to Governor Harris of Virginia, in a striking letter from which I can quote but a single paragraph, that, "The western States (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way. They have looked down the Mississippi,* * * and they looked that way for no other reason, than because they could glide gently down the stream; * * * and because they have no other means of coming to us but by long land transportations and unimproved roads." "But smooth the road, and make the way easy for them, and then see * * * how amply we shall be compensated for any trouble and expense we may encounter to effect it." Afterward, in a letter to Lafayette he observed, in speaking of his scheme of the Potomac Canal, "This * * * will bring the Atlantic States and the Western Territory into close connection, and be productive of very extensive commercial and political consequences; the last of which gave the spur to my exertions, as I could foresee many, and great mischiefs which would naturally result from a separation—and that a separation would inevitably take place, if the obstructions between the two countries remained, and the navigation of the Mississippi should be made free." Doubtless both Grenville and Townsend acted largely from instinct. Certainly Englishmen in 1763 had not thought out the American problem as accurately as had Washington twenty years later, yet none the less they obeyed a resistless impulsion when they attempted to effect the consolidation of the United States from London. Between conflicting forces a resultant must be obtained, and in this case the process reached the point where friction kindled war. On the one side lay the diverging interests of different sections of the same economic system; on the other the antagonism between two systems which were already in active competition.
The central market or capital, being the stronger, will always prey upon the provinces, and as the British Islands had been stronger than the American colonies, they had persistently used them for selfish ends. They had monopolized American trade to enrich English merchants and they had suppressed American manufactures in order to force Americans to buy English wares. By the Navigation Acts, Parliament shut out foreign shipping from the colonies; and the legislation regarding iron, aptly illustrates the policy adopted toward colonial industry. Then, as now, Great Britain could not supply pig iron enough for her Wants; therefore, she encouraged the export of pig iron from the provinces where charcoal was plenty; but I quote a passage from Adam Smith to show how rigidly she limited colonial industry to the production of the raw material and resisted competition in the sale of finished products: "While Great Britain encourages in America the manufactures of pig and bar iron, * * * She imposes an absolute prohibition upon the erection of steel furnaces, * * * in any of her American plantations. She would not suffer her colonists to work in those more refined manufactures even for their own consumption; but insists upon their purchasing of her merchants and manufacturers all goods of this kind which they have occasion for."
While French armies threatened their frontiers the inhabitants of the Atlantic coast had no alternative but to pay these indirect imposts as the price of safety, and, by so doing, they probably made a good bargain. They could hardly have protected themselves so well or so cheaply. When, however, the French were expelled from Canada, these conditions changed. The Mississippi valley lay open, and a new empire must grow up beyond the mountains; but, as between Americans and Europeans, it remained to be determined whether this new empire should be administered by natives from a native capital, or by Englishmen from London. Obviously, it was more to the advantage of Americans to regulate their own exchanges as best they could and do their own administration, than to have their exchanges adjusted for the benefit of Englishmen, and at the same time pay Englishmen for doing the work.
Conversely, the British perceived in American revolt an attack on their supremacy; for, should America become industrially and commercially independent, she could hardly fail to develop into the seat of a new economic system, which would cause the disintegration of the old. Nor in so judging did they err. It is true at the difficulty of establishing cheap transportation in the western continent postponed the catastrophe for more than a century, but each year now brings visibly nearer the crisis which the financiers of 1775 foresaw. To us, looking back over the past, the process of the formation of the new nucleus of empire can be precisely traced. Clearly it originated in the conflict between the rival forces in Europe, and could hardly have gained cohesion otherwise. France and England being hostile, the adhesion of the thirteen colonies to either side turned the scale. In the Seven Years War England and the colonies defeated France, and expelled her from the terminus she had acquired beyond the Alleghenies. In the Revolutionary War, the colonies aided by France overcame England and ejected her from her base upon the Hudson and the Chesapeake, from whence alone, she, at that time, could extend her system over the valley of the Mississippi. Lastly, In the negotiations for peace, after the surrender of Yorktown, the relations between belligerents and allies were nearly reversed.
The French did not engage in a long and costly war for love of American liberty, but to regain what they had lost. The government of Louis XVI hoped not only to weaken England In America, but also to exclude Americans from the Mississippi for, by doing so, they would strengthen Spain in Louisiana and Florida, and they had reason to believe that at a given moment, they could secure the land nominally held by Spain for France.
The French were foiled because, in the hour of victory, they were abandoned by their allies who wanted the Mississippi themselves, and who did not hesitate to speculate upon the hatred and fear of England for her most redoubtable antagonist. Mr. Jay is reported by John Adams, thus to have expressed himself: "Our allies don't play fair, he [Mr. Jay] told me; they were endeavoring to deprive us of the fishery, the western lands, and the navigation of the Mississippi; they would even bargain with the English deprive us of them; they want to play the western lands, Mississippi, and the whole Gulf of Mexico, into the hands of Spain. John Adams sympathized with his colleague. One day in conference, "I could not help observing, that the ideas respecting: the fishery appeared to me to come piping hot from Versailles.” That our advantage in being nearer "had ever been an advantage to England, because our fish had been sold in Spain and Portugal for gold and silver, and that gold and silver sent to London for manufactures; that this would be the course again; that France foresaw it, and wished to deprive England of it, by persuading her to deprive us of it; that it would be a master stroke of policy if she could succeed, but England must be completely the dupe before she could succeed.
"There were three lights in which it might be viewed: 1. As a nursery of seamen; 2. As a source of profit; 3. As a source of contention. As a nursery of seamen, did England consider us as worse enemies than France? Had she rather France should have the seamen than America? The French marine was nearer and more menacing than ours. As a source of profit, had England rather France should supply the markets of Lisbon and Cadiz with fish, and take the gold and silver, than we? France would never spend any of that money in London; we should spend it all very nearly."
Such arguments brought conviction, and thus it happened that as between two belligerents who hated and feared each other more than they hated the third party who lay between them, the United States upon most contested points obtained the advantage.
Thirty years separated the mission of Washington to Duquesne from the acknowledgment of independence by the treaty of 1783, seventeen of which were consumed in actual fighting, and at the close, though the great terminus of the world's trade-routes had been severed from the European economic systems, the process of consolidating the scattered fragments of American territory in an administrative mass had hardly begun. There is no escape, therefore, from the inference, that it had cost two wars of the first magnitude to force the population of this continent through the initial phases which every community must traverse before its territory can become the seat of international exchanges. Moralists may theorize as they will, but the displacement of energy and wealth which attends the migration of the world's central market, or, in other words, the seat of empire, involves the life and property of millions of human beings, and men have never yet learned to surrender these possessions by appeals to abstract principles.
At the outset, in America, the tendency toward repulsion between the parts, almost equalled the pressure which caused cohesion. In Virginia in 1861 repulsion finally prevailed, and yet Washington, perhaps more perfectly than any other man, personified the principle of consolidation. Probably he did so because of the quality of his mind. Washington possessed in a high degree the organizing and administrative intellect which has reached its highest development in soldiers like Alexander, Caesar, and Cromwell. Washington had the contempt of the practical man for abstractions. He understood that to succeed ill their struggle with competitors his countrymen must act with energy and unity, and that without common material interests which could only be nourished by converging arteries of commerce, the United States could never solidify.
I wish it were possible for me to give you an abstract of Washington's correspondence touching American centralization. As it is, a fragment must serve by way of suggestion, but, I may say at the outset, that Washington's education in ideas which now would be called imperialistic began when he was yet a boy, and continued without interruption until he died. They were the ideas of an acute and far-sighted man of business, who was also a man of the world. When about sixteen, Washington was sent to survey the wild region beyond the Blue Ridge, and after his campaign against Fort Duquesne he became convinced of the "practicability of an easy and short communication between the waters of the Ohio and Potomac, * * * and of the policy there would be in this State and Maryland to adopt and render it facile."
Long before the Revolution his travels through the wilderness had taught him the great features of American physical geography, and his instinct as a man of business made him recognize the Valley of the Mississippi as the certain terminus of the eastern trade which, after the victories of Clive and Wolfe, had become fully centered in London. Given the chief market and the terminus, it only remained to determine the route, and he forthwith bent his energies toward opening the Potomac as the avenue of communication. All his interests lay upon the Potomac, and he knew that those who lived upon the great highways of commerce, are those who rise to power and wealth. Perhaps his earliest ale' his most cherished ambition was to carry through the construction of the Potomac Canal.
On July 20, 1770, he wrote to Governor Johnson of Maryland: There is the strongest speculative proof in the world to me of the immense advantages which Virginia and Maryland might derive (and at a very small comparative expense) by making Potomac the channel of commerce between Great Britain, and that immense Territory; * * * the advantages of which are too great, and too obvious, I should think, to become the subject of serious debate, but which, through ill-timed parsimony and supineness, may be wrested from us and conducted through other channels. * * * How difficult it will be to divert it afterwards, time only can show."
He then conceived the idea of the Potomac Canal, and as he afterward explained to Jefferson, in 1784, the plan "was in a tolerably good train, when I set out for Cambridge in 1775, and would have been in an excellent way, had it not been for * * * the opposition which was given * * * by the Baltimore merchants, who Were alarmed, and perhaps not without cause, at the consequence of water transportation to Georgetown of the produce, which usually came to their market by land." "But with you I am satisfied that not a moment ought to he lost * * as I know the Yorkers will delay no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other communication so soon as the posts of Oswego and Niagara are surrendered."
The more Washington reflected upon events the more he became penetrated with the predominating influence of trade-routes, and the more he rebelled against the imbecility of conservatism. He saw that the British could not be expelled from Oswego and Niagara, and, therefore, that Lake Erie and the West must remain closed to New York; he saw that lack of cohesion among the States left them open to hostile discriminations by foreign nations, and in his own case he had experienced the paralysis with which local jealousies struck all enterprise when the undertaking transcended the bounds of a single community. Abroad and at home Washington saw the country losing in the race because the people lacked energy to discard tradition, and pursue "a wise, just, and liberal policy toward one another, and keep good faith with the rest of the world." In 1786 he wrote in despair to Jay "I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power, which will prevade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the State governments extends over the several States."
Yet, in spite of momentary depression, Washington was endowed with unfailing energy, and unerring instinct. He saw in the first place, that if he could make the Potomac a leading highway to the West he would establish the fortunes of Virginia upon a rock; and, in the second, that if he could accomplish this result he would bring the chief market of the Union somewhere near the geographical centre of the nation, that consolidation must follow, and that in proportion as the nation consolidated it would gather vitality. Therefore he addressed himself to the task of building the Potomac Canal, and though he failed to accomplish his immediate object, his exertions to secure unity of action among the different States which had to co-operate to grant the necessary franchises to his corporation, were the approximate cause of the calling of the convention which framed the constitution.
In 1784, Washington having made a tour through the west, wrote to Governor Harrison urging legislation. He followed up this letter by visiting both Annapolis and Richmond, and in January, 1785, obtained a charter for his proposed company. In the spring, the share-owners chose him President, and the next August he examined the Potomac from Georgetown to Harper's Ferry with a view to immediate construction. Subsequently, 35 Maryland and Virginia had to unite upon some scheme to settle questions of jurisdiction, Washington gathered representatives of both States at Mount Vernon, and this commission prepared a report. Since it appeared to the commissioners, however, that the portage between the eastern and western waters would pass through Pennsylvania, they decided that Pennsylvania must be induced to co-operate. The Maryland Legislature, also, when it approved the compact, pointed out to Virginia that Delaware should be consulted, since a canal between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake would be indispensable, and if this were the case it might be prudent to convene commissioners from all the States to consider the general question of commerce.
This suggestion commended itself to the Virginia Assembly, and invitations were issued for a meeting at Annapolis in September, 1786. In September, only five States being represented at Annapolis, the delegates could think of nothing better to do than to petition Congress to call a convention at Philadelphia to devise means to make "the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." After long hesitation Congress issued the call, Virginia sent Washington as a delegate, Washington presided over the convention and then naturally became the instrument which set the new mechanism in motion.
At Washington's inauguration the fragments of empire coalesced, and the United States became a social mass capable of sustained and energetic action. Since that event the quality of the administration has varied at different epochs, but, on the whole, the direction of the movement of the nation has been constant, external and internal phenomena reacting on each other and both contributing to the same result.
Washington served as an excellent medium through which the instinct toward centralization first found vent. He comprehended the economic character of the conflict which was raging abroad, and his policy of neutrality was conceived with the purpose of profiting by it to the utmost. "My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration, to maintain friendly terms with, but be independent of, all the nations of the earth; to share in the broils of none; to fulfill our own engagements; to supply the wants and be carriers for them all; being thoroughly convinced, that it is our policy and interest to do so. Clearly Washington was right. If America could stand between France and England she could not fail to achieve fortune by collecting the debris scattered broadcast in the struggle. You can appreciate Washington's foresight, for you know how the United States has profited and still profits by the jealousy of European powers. You have served in the war with Spain. As early as 1803 the harvest began. Defeat put Bonaparte in a position, after the catastrophe of Saint Domingo, when he seems to have doubted his ability to defend the mouth of the Mississippi against England. His conversation leads to the inference that he sold Louisiana to the United States to keep the province from Great Britain, and if, beside, by reason of his gift he could kindle war between the United Kingdom and the United States, France would be repaid for her loss.
Perhaps Napoleon may have succeeded in his design. The West received a great impulsion by the acquisition of Louisiana without which it might not have generated the energy which found expression through Clay, and which was certainly a factor in determining the rupture of 1812. On the other hand the Mississippi tempted Great Britain, as is demonstrated by the fact that her most vigorous campaign was directed against New Orleans. However this may be, I apprehend that incontestably Louisiana gravitated toward the greatest social mass upon the continent in obedience to a natural law, a law which has controlled the destiny of the members of the Spanish empire, as they have separated themselves from the parent system, in proportion as the vitality of that system has waned.
Meanwhile, during the years which followed the cession, Great Britain grew arrogant through victory, and after Trafalgar pursued a policy which is hardly explicable unless we assume that half unconsciously the English determined to venture an attack at a moment when the inchoate empire of the West might still be resolved, under pressure, into its component parts.
Men fight to defend what they conceive to be their interests, but, generally, the only interests which stir them are those which are obvious. It is this tendency to ignore the future which has always been the greatest peril of America, and it is this tendency which Washington deplored. "It is to be regretted, I confess, that Democratical States must always feel before they can see; it is this that makes their governments slow."
Viewed thus the imbecility of Mr. Madison's administration becomes explicable. The conception of national unity was too remote to stimulate. Many New Englanders regarded Mr. Jefferson with more aversion than Lord Liverpool, and submission to England as less hateful than submission to Virginia. Hence Massachusetts refused to confide the command of her militia to a national officer, even in the extremity of peril, and profited by defeat to prepare for secession.
The United States with a population of 7,000,000 had ample resources had she cared to use them. But American citizens, in 1814, after having seen their frontiers violated, their capital burned, and their ships hunted from the sea by overwhelming fleets, sat at home, and, refusing to maintain 30,000 men in the field, abandoned their armies to their fate. Only four days after the victory at Fort Erie, at the most critical moment of the Niagara campaign, General Brown wrote to Secretary Armstrong: "I very much doubt if a parallel can be found for the state of things existing on this frontier. A gallant little army struggling with the enemies of their country, and devoting their lives for its honor and its safety, left by their country to struggle alone, and that within sight and within hearing."
This was the General Brown, who, a month before at Lundy's Lane with a loss of 853 men out of less than 2,000, defeated upwards of 2,600 of the best soldiers of England. And when Brown thus asked for aid he was preparing to defend the key to the West against an overpowering force of Peninsula veterans who had been made available by the fall of Napoleon.
As I read the history of that time, not without a sense of shame, I wonder how Great Britain could have missed attaining the end for which she fought the war, which was to sever the Mississippi Valley from the Atlantic States. At Ghent, when negotiations began, she demanded as the price of peace the surrender of the ulterior as far as Ohio, and also of the shore of the Lakes. If she subsequently modified these terms it was only because Wellington advised the Cabinet that from the military standpoint such pretensions were untenable.
I have often asked myself whence came this resistance which the men who had driven Bonaparte from Spain hesitated to encounter, and the only answer I can formulate is that it came from the regular army and navy. I apprehend, therefore, that if to-day we are a great and united nation, we owe our fortune to the courage and devotion of the handful of soldiers who formed our regular army, who against great odds won the victories of Chippewa, of Lundy's Lane, and of Fort Erie; and perhaps even more than to these, our gratitude is due to the sailors who destroyed the hostile fleet upon Lake Erie, and crushed the enemy on Lake Champlain.
Little as consolidation did toward creating patriotism during the early years of this century, it gave us a national military service; and our army and navy saved the republic when civilians proved untrue to themselves.
Meanwhile, after Leipsic, France sunk into exhaustion, and the allies met to negotiate the basis on which they could establish peace. I cannot now analyze the later campaigns of Bonaparte. I must content myself by saying that although Russia and Germany had been forced temporarily to support England in order to free themselves from the French domination, the old antagonism still subsisted between the continental and insular economic systems. The trade-routes which connected the continent and the United Kingdom with the East were parallel and competing. Hence England remained jealous of the Holy Alliance; and, having failed to dismember the United States, prepared to use her as an ally to keep in check France and Russia while she made for herself all the profit possible out of the decay of Spain. On her side, the United States acceded to this policy, for she saw, in the future as in the past, an abundant harvest to be reaped by gathering in fragments of that huge and rotting empire, as fast as she found herself able to absorb them.
The respite after Waterloo which brought such general relief to Europe, availed the Spanish little. Society was diseased to the core. Unable alike to conquer the revolted colonists, or to make terms with them, Spain fell a victim to England, who, under the threat of immediate recognition of her dependencies, extorted trade concessions more advantageous than she could have enjoyed under any other conditions. She supplied both the belligerents with material of war.
Thus while Castlereagh and Canning combined with the administration of Mr. Monroe to compass the dismemberment of Spain the Holy Alliance opposed them, not only in the interests of conservatism, but because the allies hoped when the supreme hour should come, that they might be able themselves to divide the inheritance of the sufferer.
As usual the prizes fell to the United States. The rest got nothing. Our people determined to have Florida, and as the Spaniards were unable to maintain order in the province, excuses for invasions were plenty. So Spain yielding to the inevitable, agreed in 1819, to sell Florida to the Union, but even then, when the treaty reached the king, it hung in doubt. Powerful influences opposed the cession, and the Cabinet at Washington finally lost hope. Not so Mr. Rush, who living at London, could better observe the reaction upon each other of the opposing forces. Nevertheless, being anxious, he one day asked Lord Castlereagh if Great Britain were opposing his government at Madrid. He at once received the assurance that so far "as we have given expression to any opinion or wish to Spain, it has been that the treaty may be ratified."
Presently the reason for this complaisance transpired. Mr. Rush's interview occurred in August, 1819. In March, 1820, a revolution in Spain overthrew Ferdinand VII, and restored the constitution of 1812. In 1822, the United States recognized the Independence of the South American republics, and in the following September Chateaubriand pledged France at the congress at Verona to sustain Ferdinand by force. Afterward Chateaubriand boasted that his purpose in armed intervention was to put France in a position to be able to establish several Bourbon monarchies in America to counterbalance the influence of England and the United States.
No sooner did Mr. Canning divine the purpose of the allies than he besought Mr. Rush to join with him in a declaration which would avert the danger. Mr. Rush, however, was without instructions, and declined to act unless England would join the United States in the recognition of the colonies. This proposition Mr. Canning rejected, for his object was to use the United States to gain a certain end, not to compromise himself in her action. His hesitation cost his country dear, for it gave Mr. Monroe the command of the position. In November, Mr. Canning received assurances from M. de Polignac, the French ambassador at London, of the pacific intentions of the king. Though a little doubtful of French sincerity, Mr. Canning thereupon dropped his negotiation with Mr. Rush; but meanwhile Mr. Rush's dispatches had reached Washington, and Mr. Monroe's Cabinet prepared to act. The opportunity was one which rarely presents itself in nation's history. The weakest of three rivals imposed its terms upon the two strongest. The jealousy between Great Britain and the Holy Alliance made both incapable of movement. The continental powers dreaded the British fleet, and Mr. Rush pointed out that Great Britain had called in the aid of the United States because she feared France. The inference was, therefore, that she would not resist the United States, should the President oppose France, even though he used unpalatable methods. Mr. Rush wrote on October 10, to the Secretary of State: " It appears that having ends of her own in view, she [England] has been anxious to facilitate their accomplishment by invoking my auxiliary offices as the minister of the United States at this court; but as to the independence of the new states of America, for their own benefit, that seems quite another question in her diplomacy. It is France that must not be aggrandized, not South America that must be made free." Thus Mr. Monroe standing between France and England became the arbiter of the destiny of this continent, and in his message to Congress on December 2, 1823, he laid down the famous principle that he would tolerate no further European intrusion upon the western continent.
Gentlemen, that is the Monroe Doctrine. We oppose the establishment of a base of operations against us, by either of the two competing European systems, upon this continent; and the principle should be extended even more emphatically to China, for he who possesses China will possess the richest beds of mineral in the world, and will almost infallibly, sooner or later, gain control of the canal which will cross the Isthmus of Panama. That canal will be not only a route to the European market, but the cheapest highway from the mineral region of the East to the unoccupied domain of the valley of the Amazon which is now awaiting development. Thus England holds Egypt.
Mr. Monroe only elaborated the principles laid down by Washington. He gained his point, as Washington gained his, by balancing London against Paris, as we now balance London against Berlin. That principle of counterpoise had been in silent operation since the Seven Years War. It received articulate expression in 1823. Since then it has been our recognized rule of action. By its means we have already digested Louisiana, Florida, the better half of Mexico, Porto Rico and the Philippines. We have driven the French from Mexico, which we reserve for the future, as we also reserve Cuba. We are safe as long as we divide our antagonists but the danger will come hereafter. Sooner or later, unless we are especially favored by fortune, the United States will have grown so formidable, that both the old systems will turn upon her to rend her.
The Monroe Doctrine theoretically concerns only foreign relations, but foreign affairs reflect a nation's energy, and energy is developed in proportion to the mass consolidated. In America consolidation has followed an easily recognizable law.
When Washington was inaugurated, the territory he undertook to administer lay in a narrow belt between the mountains and the sea, a belt not over three or four hundred miles deep, and some thirteen hundred long. There were few industries, and practically no surplus manufactures. The agricultural products were floated down the rivers, and those exported went mostly to England. Land transportation was costly in the extreme. Hence intercommunication was difficult, the central market lay beyond the sea, and community of interest was impossible since the roads converged at London, a point distant from the frontier.
Under such conditions, a policy which favored one section, almost necessarily depressed another, and each province in turn proved restive when its livelihood was imperilled. Thus Massachusetts meditated secession when the embargo ruined her merchants, and South Carolina, as late as 1832, resorted to nullification, when the tariff lessened the purchasing power of the cotton crop.
Nothing could ameliorate such conditions but an extension westward of the territory which found its outlet upon the Atlantic, until the length of distance to be travelled, and the increase of various industries seeking sale, permitted of the convergence of highways at some market in America itself. Washington comprehended the situation, and the two cardinal principles of his policy were the cheapening of internal communications, and the encouragement of native industries. Hamilton's famous report on manufactures, sent to Congress in December, 1791, has always remained the basis of American industrial legislation; while the construction of canals became with Washington almost a fixed idea. Yet, though many men, even in the south, accepted the whole theory of consolidation, as propounded by Washington and Hamilton, few or none understood the geographical formation of the continent sufficiently to judge where the paths of least resistance lay, and where, consequently, the future commercial centre would be situated. So intelligent a man as Madison considered New York as hopelessly eccentric, and therefore unfit to be a national capital: "New York has appeared to me extremely objectionable [for a capital] on the following grounds: It violates too palpably the simple and obvious principle, that the seat of public business should be made as equally convenient to every part of the public, as the requisite accommodations for executing the business will permit. * * * The extreme eccentricity of the latter [New York] will certainly, in my opinion, bring on a premature and consequently an improper choice. People from the interior parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky will never patiently repeat their trips to this remote situation."
Washington himself, in a letter written in 1796 to Sir John Sinclair, in reply to questions regarding the value of real estate in America, thus explained his views in reference to the future: I do not hesitate to pronounce, that the lands on the waters of the Potomac will in a few years be in greater demand and in higher estimation, than in any other part of the United States.* * * I request you to examine a general map of the United States. * * * I will see that] the main river runs in a direct course to the expanded parts of the western country, and approximates nearer to the principal branches of the Ohio, than any other eastern water, and of course must become a great, if not * * * the best highway into that region; that the upper seaport of the Potomac is considerably nearer to a large portion of the State of Pennsylvania, than. that portion is to Philadelphia; * that the amazing extent of tide navigation, afforded by the bay and rivers of the Chesapeake has scarcely a parallel.
"When to these is added, that a site, at the junction of inland and tide navigations of that river is chosen for the permanent seat of the general government, * * * that the inland navigation is nearly completed, to the extent above mentioned; that its lateral branches are capable of great improvement at a small expense' * * * through which * * * an immensity of produce will be water borne, thereby making the Federal City the great emporium of the United States; * * * I am under no apprehension of having the opinion I have given * * * controverted by impartial men."
In short, Washington expected the Federal city to become a capital, if not "as large as London, yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe."
Had Washington's prevision proved even partially correct the Union would have had a different destiny, for there could probably have been no sectional division sharp enough to breed a war of secession. Although the economy of transit by the Great Lakes would finally have given a superiority to New York, yet had Virginia been able to utilize the Potomac a considerable market might have flourished within her borders, fed by avenues leading forth as well as south. In that case her interest would have favored the Union, and without Virginia no movement toward secession could have been formidable. Washington erred partly because he could not foresee the coming of railways, and partly because his education prevented him from realizing the inaptitude of the old Virginian society for industry. With slavery, the process of consolidation became more and more repugnant to the governing class; Washington himself had no successors; the Virginian presidents who succeeded him inclined toward decentralization, and Mr. Monroe actually vetoed a bill passed by Congress to provide for the maintenance of the Cumberland Turnpike, without which Virginia could make no headway against Pennsylvania and New York.
That the fate of Virginia and the South was decided by her inability to control any of the principal avenues leading west is proved by the sequence of events. In early days Virginia was the base of emigration across the mountains. One path led by Cumberland Gap and Boone's road to the banks of the Kentucky; the other by the Potomac to Cumberland and from Cumberland to Pittsburg or Wheeling. The last was the route followed by the National Turnpike, whose effect on liberty Mr. Monroe feared, and was the main line leading west up to the building of the Erie Canal. The great northern artery by Niagara and the lakes was little used, partly because Oswego, Niagara and the more important Points were long in hostile hands; but for whatever reason, when Clinton made his survey for the Erie Canal, in 181o, he found Buffalo a village with some forty houses.
So long as the Cumberland turnpike remained the dominant trade-route of the country, so long Virginia remained the dominant State. The line of her presidents was unbroken, save for one administration, for more than a generation. But on March 4, 1825, Mr. Monroe retired, in the following October Clinton passed from Lake Erie to the Hudson by the Canal, the channel of travel shifted northward and Virginia's power fell. The effect of this deflection of movement from the Potomac to the Hudson amounted to a social revolution. The North gained prodigiously on the South, and Virginia fell into eccentricity.
Under the Virginian presidents, it cost about $88 to move a ton of freight from Niagara to New York. In 1835 it cost $4.90 to transport a ton of mixed merchandise from Buffalo to Albany. In Washington's life western New York was still a wilderness. In 1850, 1,370,000 tons of merchandise passed through the Erie Canal. Within a single generation the old trail which had been followed by Marquette and La Salle by Detroit, Mackinaw, and the Chicago and Illinois rivers to the Mississippi, became the dominant trade-route and the vent for the energy of the nation. Illinois had first been colonized from Virginia, but the Virginian influence withered before the tide of emigration which surged out through the valley of the Mohawk from New England, and Chicago rose as if by enchantment into the place of the paramount market of the West. In 1835 the population of Chicago multiplied eight fold, and though the speculation of 1835 was followed by bankruptcy and collapse, yet through all the years of depression which followed, the grain trade grew, until in 1850 the building of the railroads began to transform civilization.
The railroads completed in a decade what the Erie Canal had begun. They destroyed the South as a separate system. I ask you to examine the map which shows the main lines of railway in 1858. You will observe that between Cumberland and Atlanta the mountains were pierced only by the single track which connected Richmond with Knoxville, and that the grades on this road were then, and still are, too steep for economy relatively to the Pennsylvania and Lake Shore. You will also note that Virginia had by that time succumbed to Baltimore, whose jealousy more than half a century earlier had defeated Washington's enterprises. By the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad the Ohio Valley was brought into direct relation with the head of Chesapeake Bay, and Washington Alexandria, and Norfolk were discarded.
You see at a glance that the coast States, from the Potomac to Charleston, were severed from the West, and that Charleston controlled but one outlet, which ended at Memphis. To the north on the contrary, a network of thoroughfares converged at Chicago, whence the larger part of the traffic reached the sea by Niagara and the Hudson, while a substantial portion, attracted by the mineral development of western Pennsylvania, passed by Pittsburg. Consequently the South remained semi-torpid, and the mines of Virginia undeveloped, while the northwest grew vigorously, with Chicago for a metropolis.
In 1850 Chicago had about 30,000 inhabitants; in 1860, 112,000; and Chicago's rise to supremacy in the West was recognized by its choice as the city where the Republican Convention should be held in 1861. It was this supremacy of Chicago which precipitated the war of secession, for in 1861 the South had the alternative presented it of being absorbed in the economic system which connected the Mississippi with the Atlantic by way of Chicago, Buffalo, Pittsburg and New York, or of defending itself by measures that would be incompatible with the maintenance of the Union.
It was the old but ever-recurring question of parallel trade routes between the same termini, each having its own portion of tributary communities, and its independent civilization. As the two could not exist together on equal terms, and the weaker must sooner or later become subject to the stronger, the South had to choose between war and eventual submission. It chose war and experience has proved that men uniformly, under such circumstances, choose war, where they conceive that in battle there is hope of victory.
Thus the United States seems to have passed through three distinct phases of consolidation, and to have entered upon a fourth.
The first phase began with the inauguration of Washington, and lasted until the retirement of Monroe. It was a period of territorial accretion, but of slow centralization because of the lack of highways between the East and West. Its close was marked by two phenomena which I conceive to have a relation to each other; the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, and the opening of the Erie Canal. The declaration of the Monroe Doctrine indicated a rise in national energy, and a tendency toward greater unity of purpose, for it received then, and has continued to receive, general popular support. Neither Washington nor any subsequent president, up to Mr. Monroe, was so fortunate as to be able to concentrate the community behind him, when he dealt with those who controlled the markets abroad to which the different sections of the Union were tributary. With the opening of the Erie Canal the first traces are to be observed of the formation of lines long enough to converge within our own territory; and indeed, it was not many years later that the pressure of protection, which was created by the growth of northern industries, precipitated the nullification movement in South Carolina. Nullification was the refusal of cotton planters to be taxed in aid of manufactures in Pennsylvania and New England. South Carolina insisted on being allowed to buy and sell in England where she could trade to more profit than in Boston or New York.
The second period opened in 1825 and extended to the Civil War. It was an interval of very rapid improvement in communication, and of corresponding growth of the national instinct. This national instinct found expression through orators like Webster, and soldiers like Jackson, who when president, threatened to deal summarily with nullification. On the other hand the tendency toward consolidation was resisted by the South, the weaker competitor, and this resistance culminated in 1861 in war.
The third period dates from 1865. In 1865 the independent southern system had been crushed, and the civilization which had been its product had been destroyed. The United States had become centralized upon those lines of communication which ex tend from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and which converge at Chicago and New York. There was no further resistance at home but it remained to be determined whether America could complete her communications and industrial works, and operate them at a profit in competition with Europe. In 1865 the United States had little accumulated capital in proportion to the task be fore her, and she entered upon her enterprise with borrowed money. The constructive period lasted about 25 years, at whose end foreign creditors demanded payment of their loans. It is impossible now, and would be useless, to enter into the details of what followed. It suffices to say that in 1894, when all the surplus gold of the country had been exported, it became apparent that unless the prices of manufactures could be depressed to the point where we could pay our debts by the medium of merchandise, in stead of by the medium of bullion, the country would ultimately become bankrupt, and would, probably, break down.
After a period of social convulsion which lasted some four years, Pittsburg succeeded in underselling all competitors in steel, and almost instantly the conditions changed. The ships of the world could not convey our products to foreign lands, we paid our creditors with ease, wealth accumulated as it had never accumulated before. In 1899 we had became the greatest of industrial communities. We consumed the most cotton in our mills, we mined the most iron ore, we manufactured the most steel, we raised and burned the most coal. Our railways were the most perfect and the best equipped and yet they operated, cheapest. In a word, consolidation had done its initial work. The country had expanded westward until its roads could meet at a point within its own borders, and at the same time it had so improved its administrative processes, that at the point where its roads met it could control the market. Instead, therefore, of being longer a nucleus lying at the extremity of two economic systems and serving them both as a terminus, the United States had herself become the seat of empire, and the point where both European and Asiatic trade routes promised to converge.
You will perceive, without further words from me, what this revolution must portend, if such a revolution has indeed taken place; and that it has taken place is hard to doubt. You have only to look abroad at the relative place which England held 50 Years ago, and compare it with the place she holds now. You know what the ablest Englishmen think. So long as London remained the dominant market all highways led to the Thames, and the English empire cohered naturally. Now Mr. Chamberlain says, and says, probably, truly, that unless Britain can pay her colonies to remain with her, her empire must dissolve. But the dissolution of the British empire would logically be one effect of the transfer of the centre of gravity of human civilization from the eastern to the western continent.
Under such circumstances we can address ourselves to no graver task than to examine the effect of the forces which have been in action during the past, in order that we may form some estimate of the probable demands which may be made upon us in the future. To-morrow I shall present certain deductions relating to these phenomena, which may not be unworthy of the consideration of the Staff of the American Navy whose duty it is to guard the safety and honor of our country.
Gentlemen:—Yesterday I asked you to follow the growth of the United States from a wilderness which promised to become a prospective terminus for two competing European economic systems, to the present time when she is apparently developing into a gigantic empire. To-day, with your permission, I shall try to analyze the causes which led to Great Britain's high-fortune, in order that, by comparing the history of the last great consolidation with the present, we may adduce principles which may guide us in the future.
We may assume, I think, that England entered upon her grand career shortly after the victories of Clive and Wolfe, and that the year 1761 may be fixed as a convenient starting point when the Duke of Bridgewater opened the canal which connected his coal mines with Manchester, and thus gave that city cheap fuel. No one will dispute that this event approximately marked the advent of the phenomenon called the "Industrial Revolution," when all social movement was accelerated by canals, by railways, and by steam. From 1761 Great Britain advanced fast in wealth and power until the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, when she may be considered to have achieved her fullest ascendancy; and this period of ascendancy lasted, practically, without diminution, until the consolidation of Germany in 1870 inaugurated a period of energetic industrial competition. Never before or since has the relative importance of England been so great as during this interval of about half a century.
If then, taking the coronation of Queen Victoria as a starting point, we go back through history to seek the origin of British success, we shall pass from effect to cause until we halt at the disruption of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, when the sack of Antwerp drove a portion of the Flemish shipping, to frequent the Thames, because of the greater security offered by an island.
England did not, however, become immediately the seat of an extended empire, or indeed a very important market, for she had not acquired a terminus in Asia nor the highways leading thereto, nor had she developed her domestic industries upon a large scale. Her time did not come until by conquering India and Canada she established her system of commercial exchanges, and by plundering Bengal she obtained the quick capital to improve her communications and consolidate her manufactures.
Her triumph was accelerated by the adaptation of coal to smelting and the improvement of the steam engine.
Yet strong as was England's position after the administration of Chatham, one thing was lacking. She held her base in India, she could guard her shipping against the French, she had occupied Canada and opened the valley of the Mississippi, but the strip of Territory between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies still escaped her, and unless she could control the entry to the recesses of the American continent by way of such sea-ports as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the rest would avail her but imperfectly. Compromise with her colonists as she might, unless master here, the terms on which she traded would be fixed by strangers, and the British economic system would be split in two.
Should this interpretation of the outbreak of the American Revolution seem fanciful, I can only beg you to ponder the facts for yourselves. The act of the colonists which precipitated the crisis occurred in Boston when the British tried to force their eastern trade on Massachusetts, on distasteful terms.
Charles Townshend in 1767 caused Parliament to put a duty on tea. As a means of raising a revenue the measure failed, for the province declined to buy English importations and smuggled from Holland. In consideration of entering their territory the colonists exacted that trade should be free at their ports. From the British standpoint to surrender to this demand was to surrender all; for if the colonists could dictate the terms of entry at the frontier they became, forthwith, a foreign and competing nation.
By 1770 the East India Company already suffered from stoppage of the usual vent, tea collected in their warehouses, and to protect stockholders, and at the same time placate Americans by offering them a bargain, Parliament substituted for the duty of a shilling a pound theretofore collected upon importation into England, a duty of three pence to be collected in America. You know the rest; the citizens of Boston sacked the tea-ships, rather than permit their ports to be used contrary to their wish.
No issue could be more clearly joined, and the controversy went to the root of modern international competition, for on it turned the unity or the disruption of the economic system then beginning to centre in London. The defeat was decisive. England never could construct a dominating empire like that of Rome, and the fatal effect on that kingdom of a consequent dislocation of exchanges is becoming more evident with each passing year. Mr. Chamberlain now confronts the difficulty. He contemplate an empire without a sovereign, or an organism which cannot coerce its members. Such empires are, in reality, leagues like our Confederation, and have seldom proved more than a shadow in the face of opposition. America has been able to develop independently of, and in competition with, the parent. Canada and Australia will doubtless do the same.
I wish to emphasize the fact that England failed in our Revolutionary War chiefly because of the imperfect training of her military and official class. They had not studied in advance the problems to be solved, and were neither prepared to overcome resistance, nor to compromise. They acted from instinct, obeying from day to day the pressure which impelled them along the path of least resistance, the greatest resistance being always offered by their own incapacity to master the relations of cause and effect with which they had to deal. The superiority of such administrators as Alexander and Caesar lay in the possession of this quality. I apprehend that our chief danger in the future may be an inheritance of this characteristic. We are naturally a race of gamblers, who trust to chance; and it is this gambling tendency which makes preparation for war unpopular. War is costly and painful to contemplate; therefore the temptation is to ignore the teachings of the past, and erect the theory that mankind will eventually learn to live in peace into a moral dogma. Meanwhile the experience of many thousand years proves that under certain conditions war is inevitable. Those conditions consist in a certain intensity of economic competition.
For example, as between England and her colonies a divergence of interest existed which was fundamental. A prize of immeasurable value lay at stake which both parties coveted too intensely to yield, except in the last extremity. After the destruction of the tea, Great Britain had to apply coercion or abandon the attempt to consolidate an empire, with all the advantages which such a consolidation implied. Thereupon she did what every other people has done under like circumstances, she tried force. Furthermore the measures adopted were not ill-conceived in themselves; the failure came from administrative impotence.
Five acts were passed to pacify Massachusetts. The first closed Boston as a port of entry; the second annulled the charter; the third provided for the trial in England of soldiers accused of violence toward citizens; the fourth regulated the quartering of troops upon the inhabitants, and the fifth extended the boundaries of Canada to the 011ie,. Thus the colonies were isolated; Great Britain held the sea on the east and the valley of the Saint Lawrence on the north, while to the west she extended the jurisdiction of an absolute viceroy over the whole region won from France. You see the strength of the position which England sought to win, and that the prize was worth a contest. Had she conquered the colonists who inhabited the belt between the ocean and the Ohio Valley, she would have held her base in Asia, she would have possessed an unrivalled industrial plant at home, and she would have opened a practically exhaustless vent for her manufactures and a storehouse of raw material in America. In the case of victory, she would not have had to fear the protective American legislation, which has built up American competition. She would have regulated her exchanges with this continent to suit herself. So far as we can judge, something approaching equilibrium might have been established, and under such conditions America might have remained an agricultural community, and Great Britain might have served as the universal market down to the present day. Viewed thus it is apparent that the stake for which England played in 1775 was little less than universal empire; and this brings us to the consideration of what England as at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War; what the so-called "Industrial Revolution" meant; and why that phenomenon should have first tended to hasten the American Revolution, and afterward should have precipitated a social convulsion in France.
I have said that the "Industrial Revolution" began with the completion of the Bridgewater Canal to Manchester, because the creation of the canal system was the basis of the English industrial development of the last decades of the eighteenth century. Previous to 1760 the roads of England were so bad as to make transportation of bulky merchandise by land impossible upon a large scale. The cost was prohibitive. From London to Birmingham the charge ran from 25 to 35 dollars a ton, and from London to Exeter 6o dollars. In winter, traffic was impossible. In 1607 Camden declared that he approached the Lancashire people with dread, and when he started to make his survey commended himself to the divine mercy. Matters had not changed very much a hundred years later, for the Rev. Mr. Brome, who travelled for three years throughout the islands, and saw many wonderful things, wintered like an Arctic explorer when wet weather set in. Carriers used pack-horses, as the roads were generally too deep for wagons. From Manchester in 1757, there was but one coach to London every second day, and it took four days and a half to do the 130 miles.
Under such conditions, in winter, towns were isolated, and often suffered from famine. Sometimes Manchester had bread riots, one of which called the Shude Hill fight was rather serious and was long remembered. It cost 40s. a ton to convey goods from Manchester to Liverpool by road, and 12s. by river; but by river there was danger of damage by the way.
Many years later Arthur Young travelled through Lancashire, and thus described the highway between Wigan and Preston, the great road north from Liverpool and Manchester to Carlisle and Glasgow: "I know not, in the whole range of language, terms sufficiently expressive to describe this infernal road. * * * Let me most seriously caution all travellers, who may accidentally propose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it as they would the devil; for a thousand to one they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breakings-down. They will here meet with ruts, which I actually measured four feet deep, and floating with mud only from a wet summer; what, therefore, must it be after a winter? The only mending it in places receives is tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose but jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner. These are not opinions, but facts; for I actually passed three carts broken down in these eighteen miles of execrable memory."
While communication with the interior remained thus imperfect, Liverpool could not grow. Bristol surpassed it in importance. No stage-coach ran between Liverpool and Manchester until 1767, and then only thrice weekly. It took from early morning until late at night to accomplish the 30 miles. Beyond Manchester the country grew worse, and the moors between Lancashire and Yorkshire were little better than a wilderness. In 1724 Manchester had a population of 2400 families or about 12,000 inhabitants. In 1757 Manchester and Salford together had but 20,000; so that the growth in a generation had been slow. Indeed a dense Population could not have been supported.
In 1760 in all departments of applied science England lagged behind the continent. When the Industrial Revolution began Holland had long since finished her extensive net-work of inland navigation, and Arthur Young as late as 1787 wrote thus of French roads as compared with the English: "The roads here are stupendous works. * * * These ways are superb even to a folly. Enormous sums must have been spent to level even gentle slopes. * * * There is a bridge of a single arch, and a causeway to it, truly magnificent; we have not an idea of what such a road is in England." *
Technical education was neglected; so much so that the early engineers were usually illiterate. John Metcalf, the first great road maker, started life as a blind fiddler. Brindley who built the Bridgewater Canals on a salary of three shillings and six pence a day, was a millwright's apprentice who could hardly read, and never spelled well enough to make his notes fully intelligible to others. George Stevenson began as a day-laborer in the mines.
Notwithstanding these drawbacks, no sooner had the eastern trade been centralized in London by means of Clive's and Wolfe's victories, and an adequate capital provided for construction by the plunder of Bengal, than England began to develop with an energy which, allowance being made for a difference of bulk, at least equalled the recent growth of the United States.
Industrial England is small and compact. Industrial America is vast. If Manchester be taken as the centre, industrial England will be found to lie within a radius of little more than 100 miles, no important point being much above 50 miles from tidewater. The region is full of coal and iron, often lying near the coast which abounds with harbors. The rivers are small, numerous, and adapted to feed inland navigation; there are no formidable mountains.
Manchester is distant but thirty-two miles from Liverpool, the intervening country being so easy that, with land damages included, the Duke of Bridgewater built the canal between the two cities and his own coal mines, for $1,100,000. Birmingham, which may, perhaps, be considered as the heart of British industry and which lies near the middle of the kingdom, is equally well situated in regard to transportation. 112 miles by rail from London, it is nearly equidistant from Liverpool and Bristol, and 78 miles from the former. Previous to the opening of the canals it has cost 5 pounds sterling a ton to convey freight from Liverpool to Birmingham; the canal reduced the rate to 1 pound 10 shillings. Short distances made the outlay for construction small. The Grand Trunk system of canals which connected Birmingham with the Mersey, the Severn, and the Thames, measured only 250 miles, and was completed in 1777, while the 3100 miles of inland navigation which, at the close of the century, intersected the United Kingdom cost 50,000,000 pounds. By 1794 there was no "place in England, south of Durham, more than fifteen miles from water communication; and most of the large towns, especially in the manufacturing districts, were directly accommodated with the means of easy transport of their goods to the principal markets." The hills between Lancaster and Yorkshire were pierced by three navigable canals.
The effect was prodigious. Manchester's population advanced from 20,000 in 1757, to 41,000 in 1774, and 84,000 in 1801; while Liverpool's shipping which had been estimated at 8619 tons in 1701, exceeded 450,000 in 1800.
The sequence of cause and effect seems complete. The competition between England and France for the eastern trade generated the Seven Years War; by 1760 the Seven Years War had given India and Canada to England, and with India the treasure of Bengal. Then simultaneously followed the industrial revolution in Great Britain, and the attempt to reorganize America, as the western terminus of the new economic system, on such a basis as to form a cohesive whole. The first boat-load of coal sailed over the Barton viaduct to Manchester on July 17, 1761. On February 10, 1763, the treaty of Paris was signed, which established the naval and colonial superiority of Great Britain. On March 22, 1765, the Royal Assent was given to the Stamp Act. On the last day of 1772 the locks of Runcorn were opened which completed the Liverpool and Manchester Canal. On December 16, 1773, the people of Boston sacked the tea-ships. In 1774 Watt and Bolton went into partnership to manufacture the steam engine, and on March 18 of the same year, the Boston Port sill was brought into the House of Commons. The following May, General Gage took command of Boston.
I conceive that this chronological table alone enables us to estimate roughly the effect which the economic consolidation of England produced upon the relations between the central market of the new system and its American terminus. It yet remains to consider the impact of the victorious organism upon its defeated rival on the continent of Europe.
England had consolidated rapidly after the Cromwellian Wars, because during those wars the superiority of the attack over the defense had been established. Thereafter no local power remained which could defy the central energy. In France in 1770, feudalism still lingered. Feudalism was the legal name for decentralization, because feudal law expressed the fact that the defense in war predominated over the attack. A country is decentralized when the provinces are independent, or quasi-independent; and a province is independent which cannot be coerced.
Thus under the Confederation, America was decentralized because the central power could not coerce the members; nor was the superiority of the attack over the defense demonstrated until Lee surrendered at Appomattox. In France in the eleventh century decentralization reached an extreme. Most barons could build castles formidable even to a king, and such barons became quasi-independent princes who exercised all the functions of sovereignty within a restricted territory. The great frontier fortresses were gigantic and almost impregnable. Accordingly the monarchy never thoroughly reduced the chief provinces to subordination, and cities in France retained a power of oppressing the adjacent country which would have been impossible in England. The privileges of Bordeaux were not exceptional and yet Bordeaux laid waste a considerable district by closing the avenue of the Garonne to the export of wines which competed with her own. "Who would dare to believe," said the economist Goyon de la Plombanie of Perigord, "that the council of our kings, when it accorded this abusive privilege to the city of Bordeaux, even suspected that this singular right would occasion a general devastation. * * * What sight is more afflicting than to contemplate a district fifty leagues in length, by twenty, at least in breadth, almost altogether uncultivated and abandoned.
Under the disadvantages of decentralization, France had long before proved unable to contend commercially with Holland; and Colbert had supported Louvois in making war in 1672 against the United Provinces because, having failed to overcome the opposition to a uniform administration at home, he saw no remedy but to crush his rival by force. Colbert estimated that out of 20,000 ships in the world, the Dutch owned i5,000 or 16,000, and these he proposed, by conquering Holland, to drive from the sea. Ile failed, and after his failure France declined apace; nevertheless as long as native industries could live, the catastrophe was postponed. The crisis came when, by the consolidation of her society, Great Britain succeeded in throwing masses of manufactured material on the international market, at prices with which the French could not cope. The effect was precisely similar to the establishment of a modern department store among old-fashioned retail tradesmen. It was bankruptcy. Movement in France nearly ceased, and actual starvation set in, because the people could neither sell their agricultural products nor their manufactures. Arthur Young in 1787, although he praised the roads in France, observed that no one used them: "The traffic of the way, how ever, demands no such exertions; one-third of the breadth is beaten, one-third rough, and one-third covered with weeds. In 36 miles, I have met one cabriolet, half a dozen carts, and some old women with asses. For what all this waste of treasure? * * * Women without stockings, and many without shoes; but if their feet are poorly clad, they have a superb consolation in walking upon magnificent causeways; the new road is fifty feet wide, and fifty more digged away or destroyed to make it."
Much has been written touching the distress in France before the Revolution and, I am inclined to believe, without exaggeration. Only last year M. Marcel Marion published an excellent little treatise upon the condition of the rural classes in the Bordeaux district during the last half of the eighteenth century. I gave you but one extract, by no means the most striking: "It is perhaps in the year 1789 itself that the distress attains its highest Point. 'The misery augments,' writes, on May 2, the delegate of Saint Foy; * * * resources are exhausted, the people have no credit, and all that could have served as nourishment for the poor, such as potatoes, cabbages, turnips, herbs, is entirely destroyed by the winter frosts.'
"At Soulac, of 100 families, 90 are in extreme indigence; at Eyzines, many sleep without eating; at Cerons, the day laborer is reduced, since two months, to take but half his usual nourishment, and this only on condition that his wife and children take but one third of theirs. (Reponses des cures)—it seems, that Linguet did not exaggerate when he declared that the lot of American slaves was better than that of French peasants."
England undersold the continent because England could deal more rapidly with larger masses, and England succeeded in so doing, because by the help of her conquests and her minerals she reached a higher degree of consolidation sooner than any continental nation; for in decentralization Germany surpassed France. The effect was a convulsion, both internal and external. France, driven to the wall, had to consolidate her society with rapidity, and, being unable by this means alone to attain to immediate relief, she attacked her adversary.
The Liverpool and Manchester Canal and the introduction of the steam engine were contemporaneous events, happening in 1773 and 1774. France thought at first to disable her enemy and strengthen herself by aiding the American revolt. Failing here, the Revolution of 1789 became inevitable, and the Napoleonic wars resulted from the Revolution. Time fails me to examine the policy of Napoleon, nor is it necessary for the present purpose. What concerns us, immediately, is the application of the history of this last economic consolidation to our own circumstances.
If the inferences drawn from the facts adduced are well founded, momentous events followed upon the conquest of the eastern trade by Great Britain, and upon the industrial development of a narrow region lying mainly in the northern counties of England and the south of Scotland. In its largest sense this industrial district, allowing it to extend in length from London W Glasgow, and in breadth from London to Swansea, cannot be reckoned as more than about 400 miles by 160. If we compare these dimensions with ours which stretch from Duluth to New York, and from Chicago to Birmingham, we perceive at once the cause of our slower, development, and the greater energy which has been demanded to produce a given result. Assuming, however, that the United States has relatively about reached the Point occupied by England toward the year 1789, we can hardly expect that the effect of a perfected consolidation, should it be accomplished, will be proportionately less than were the effects of the consolidation of Great Britain a century and a quarter ago.
If I am right in my theory that the energy developed in social consolidation is proportionate to the mass to be consolidated, then the energy now being generated in America should be in the ratio of about four or five to one, as. compared with the energy a England. Probably such an estimate would be excessive, but in any case our energy is evidently the greater of the two. You have only to measure our transportation by English transportation, or our building by English building, to be convinced.
I take the single building to be the unite of any civilization, and consolidation, therefore, may pretty accurately be tested by the character of architecture. Within the past few years, as consolidation has acquired intensity in America, the steel cage has appeared, because the steel cage, theoretically, admits of a higher degree of concentration, and, therefore, of economy, than any known type of construction. The energy which, a generation ago was diffused over a street, is now concentrated under a single roof; as, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the energy which had been diffused through a hundred separate family dwellings became concentrated, in a single factory.
The inference is that within these last few years civilization has entered on a new phase, much as it entered on a new phase when it passed from the pack-horse to the canal-boat subsequent to 1776.
If the building is the foundation on which society rests, then, in the matter of its foundation, the world has passed from site substances as wood, brick and stone, the material used by all antecedent generations, to steel; and by so doing has altered the conditions of competition. Cheap ore which is found only occasionally must henceforth be, to civilized races, as prime a necessity as the brick or stone which is found universally.
Here lies the crux of the future; for I will, if you will permit me, assume for the moment, that we shall succeed in organizing and maintaining a civilization whose economy of operation shall be proportionate to the concentration of the steel cage. Our success will force all competing nations to adopt our standard, as surely as England forced the continent to adopt her standard when she accelerated movement in the eighteenth century. But you can estimate as well as I, what would be the effect on the iron trade were all Europe to attempt reconstruction on the scale on which we have been rebuilding our cities and our railways within the last ten years.
We are in good times producing pig iron at the rate of roughly about 20,000,000 tons annually, and, supposing the country to continue its growth, we shall be producing between forty and fifty million tons within twenty years; nor does the demand appear to be limited by anything but the money available to be converted from quick into fixed capital. No one can foretell how long our mines will endure such consumption before the price of ore rises; and a rising price is tantamount to exhaustion in the face of a cheap foreign supply. I apprehend, however, that Europe cannot undertake reconstruction at present, because Europe has not the steel available, at the requisite price. Yet if we succeed, Europe cannot stand still. To do so is to succumb. We appear, therefore, to be confronted by an alternative. Either within the next generation America herself will be driven to seek supplies of ore beyond her borders, or if not, her very success in production will constrain competing nations to do so.
At present, so far as we know, Northern China offers the most abundant and the cheapest supply of minerals, combined with the most advantageous labor, and accordingly Northern China promises to be the terminus of modern trade-routes, in that imperative sense which implies that without its resources modern competition cannot be sustained.
I beg you to reflect on how this contingency which is already upon us, must affect the United States. Admitting that Northern China should be developed by some energetic and administrative race, the product of China would undersell the American product in the Pacific; for that we must be prepared. The accessibility of the mines to the coast; the abundance of iron and flux and coal, and the cost of labor combine to make such a result probable. Furthermore, you are now engaged in a highly revolutionary and speculative enterprise.
The Government is pledged to construct a canal across the Isthmus, a work which sooner or later promises to deflect trade-routes and thus remodel empires. At the outset I need not point out to you how commanding a position England holds at Kingston, relatively to any such highway.
Leaving aside, however, for the moment, questions referring to particular competitors, and recurring to general principles, I affirm that no lesson is more enforced by history than that which teaches us that, he who holds the terminus and the market will one day also hold the connecting road. I need not go back to the middle ages; I will take a modern instance. The French built the Suez Canal, but the English soon acquired control thereof. Apply this precedent to ourselves; and it is the more forcible, since we have to face a sharper competition, and we are inferior at sea to any probable coalition which might be made against us. We lie between two adversaries, England and the Continent, both of whom we menace, and either of whom would gladly destroy us were the nearer enemy eliminated.
Of these two adversaries the one most actively hostile is, at present, the great continental economic system which connects China, overland, with the North Sea. The heart of this system at Berlin, the chief western port is Hamburg, and the arteries of communication branch out north to Petersburg; east to Moscow, Lake Baikal, Port Arthur and Pekin, south-east by the Volga to the Caspian, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf, and south to Breslan, Kief, Odessa and the Black Sea. Over some of these roads from the dawn of time, commerce has flowed between the East and West, and the richest provinces of the world lapsed into deserts because rates for freight were one day made more cheaplY bY ships sailing round Ceylon, than by caravans crossing the Pamirs or the Hindoo Kush.
For several centuries, as the markets upon the North Sea gradually acquired ascendancy, Russia tended to consolidate, and as.it consolidated to stretch westward toward the ports which gave its traffic vent. Parts of Sweden, Poland, Turkey and other states were absorbed. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century this movement acquired an energy which caused the nations of the West to coalesce in opposition and thus precipitated the Crimean War. That war decided the destiny of Russia. The siege of Sebastopol practically coincided with our discovery of gold in California, with the opening of Japan, and with the quickening of movement on the Pacific. From the peace of 1856 Russia reversed her attitude and followed a path of expansion eastward which offered larger possibilities and less resistance than that which led to the North Sea and the Mediterranean. She now confronts the United States and Japan more decidedly than she confronts any European power. There can be no doubt that the phenomena developed by the United States and Russia not only have a relation to each other, but that the two civilizations must contend in the future for domination in eastern waters. But if Russia has found an outlet overland toward China and the Yellow Sea, Germany has been less lucky. During the middle ages the Germans fought persistently to penetrate the wastes beyond the Niemen, but, on the whole, since Ivan the Terrible began the consolidation of modern Russia, the Germans have lost ground. On the other hand the continental growth of the overland trade has built up Leipsic, Berlin, and the Kingdom of Prussia which forms the core of the modern empire, and this northern consolidation promises to spread along the shore of the North Sea as far as Antwerp to the south, it may attract the German provinces of Austria. There, however, expansion seems destined to stop, and yet unless the Germans can find an outlet for their surplus energy and add both to their territory which yields a revenue and to their mineral resources, they may be unable to maintain their relative position toward countries like the United States, Russia and England, which have superior advantages. The obvious method to obtain relief is to establish a terminus beyond the ocean, and for the Germans, South America is the only region still substantially empty, rich, undefended, and accessible, which remains open. Hence the desire of the German Emperor to obtain a foothold therein; since all intelligent Germans know that the resources of their country, which were never bountiful, have been utilized to the utmost, and that should Germany be confined to the continent of Europe she may, like Japan, if shut in her islands by Russia, run the risk of suffocation. Under such conditions we shall be justified in inferring that Germany will do her best to annihilate the power which opposes her.
Thus we have two great nations, Russia and Germany, which together form a mighty economic system, stimulated by the same pressure, expanding in opposite directions, from a fixed base, one end stretching toward the east, the other toward the west; and the channel by which these ends must communicate is a canal across the American Isthmus. The necessity for communication is obvious; the success of such a development must depend on the abundance of the supply of minerals, especially of steel, and these minerals will, presumably, be best obtained in China. Furthermore, no insuperable difficulties seem to beset the industrial organization of Shansi and Honan, provided the provinces can be conquered and administered. The Russians are well situated to invade, while the Germans have both the capital and the talent for administration. Already the economic union of Germany and Russia is advanced; the Germans are steadily absorbing more and more of the Russian industry and commerce, and German is becoming the language of mercantile affairs in the chief Russian cities.
I need not dwell on the possibilities suggested by these speculations. It suffices to say that the first step in such a social revolution would be the establishment of a new trade-route between Europe and China, with a central vent in South America. Under these conditions the United States would be thrown into eccentricity. Moreover, however this may be, I do not conceive that the initial step of determining the destiny of South America can be indefinitely postponed. The United States must either act herself or permit others to act, or else she must defeat in battle invasions of the country. To meet any of these contingencies she should be armed, and not armed with a puny force, but as a power of the first magnitude. Judging from the past the men who, in the end, will prevail in South America, will be those who can control the cheapest steel, and the power who can do this may probably be the one which commands the minerals and the labor of China.
On the other hand if we suppose a contest between England Russia and Germany in the East, in which England should be diet victor, the ultimate result, so far as we are concerned, would not perhaps be much more favorable. We should be injured because England could hardly prevail without gaining such a superiority over her antagonist as to leave her practically alone, confronting us, and unable to escape from a struggle for supremacy, very much as Rome and Carthage struggled for supremacy in ancient times. It is the old question of a base, a central market and a vent. I will illustrate what I have to say by the agitation which is now going on for a consolidation of the British empire.
Examine the social condition of England and you will find that all her present difficulties flow directly from her defeats in 1780 and in 1814, for she then lost the Mississippi valley as a terminus. England is pinched since she has to buy raw materials and food, cannot sell her manufactured product at a price high enough to balance the account, because of competition and hostile tariffs. Could she still command the interior of this continent she would not have to contend with adverse legislation or centralized competition on a formidable scale.
For many years Englishmen seemed incapable of grasping the situation, but since the Boer War their predicament has been forced upon their attention, and now Mr. Chamberlain bases his proposed policy upon the postulate that the British empire must dissolve unless greater cohesion can be given to the parts. To the unprejudiced observer it has long seemed probable that such a catastrophe might happen should the centre of international ex- changes become permanently established in New York, because, in that case, trade-routes would recentralize, and the countries ranged along these routes would gravitate toward a western market. In that event England would sink into the position of a quasi province of America, and it is to prevent such an eventuality that Mr. Chamberlain recommends a discriminating tax on food. Charnberlain proposes ultimately to make the British economic system self-supporting, as it would have been had England prevailed in our Revolutionary War. I doubt not that the initial steps of this enterprise would be taken without hostile intent toward this country; but such a path leads far. You cannot have a self-supporting empire without a base, a central market and a terminus. The only adequate terminus for the sale of commodities which now presents itself to England is North and South America, and the only base whence adequate supplies of minerals can be drawn, at a remunerative price, seems to be China.
Suppose Great Britain to occupy and develop Northern China as she has developed South Africa, she would have her base and her raw and manufactured material, and then the question would arise as to South America, precisely as it would arise with Germany, or with any country having a mass of cheap steel seeking a vent, together with a surplus population. We should be her only opponent. With us destroyed she would enjoy universal empire like Rome. I apprehend that, since the world began, such conditions have always bred war, and in this case supremacy might hinge on a naval battle. Should we lose the canal we should be enveloped. Please observe, I express no opinion as to the value of Mr. Chamberlain's proposition, as to the energy of Great Britain, or as to the possibility of winning a decisive victory in the East. All I wish to point out is the danger for us of the distinct predominance of either one of the two competitors whose quarrels have been our safety for nearly two hundred years.
On questions so vast, involving causes and effects so complex, the conclusions of any individual must be fallacious; a valuable approximation can only be reached as the result of a consensus of opinion of such a body of men as you, who have both the ability and the means to study. Were I to hazard a conjecture, I should surmise that Englishmen have thought out the problems before them hardly more effectually than they resolved the problems of 1774. In this way they are unlike the Germans who labor intensely. And yet, with all that intelligence and patience can do, the difficulties which confront Germany and Russia are great I had almost said insuperable. We hold at present the position of advantage. Therefore my inference is clear. We enjoy the good fortune of standing between two economic systems which counterbalance each other, and which will, in the end, exhaust each other if we so handle our opportunities as to prevent either from obtaining a decisive advantage. Accordingly our aim is simple. We have only to keep things as they are as long as possible, and when a determination of the struggle can no longer be postponed, we should be ready to deal with the prize as we dealt with the valley of the Mississippi, for which France and England fought so long. Such has been our policy regarding South America during more than two generations; a policy which we have been able to maintain without war, and with little risk, because we have been resolute, and have understood our own interest. I apprehend that our government could take no wiser course than to extend the principle enunciated by President Monroe over the mineral region of Northern China. Of this we may rest assured; while our competitors can be kept asunder we can rule; our hour of peril will come when by war or otherwise they consolidate and the consolidation turns on us. Then China will be organized and opened. It matters for us little by whom.
Hitherto I have proceeded upon the assumption that we are domestically so well organized that we shall succeed in accomplishing our destiny (unless we meet defeat from a foreign enemy), by cheapening our civilization through consolidation. Yet I must admit that upon this point I harbor doubts. I am clear that the seat of empire is in movement, but I am not so sure that we shall succeed in anchoring it within our borders.
Touching the first point I think the evidence decisive. The conditions which exist in England and Russia are precisely those which would be anticipated were trade recentralizing. They recall the conditions which prevailed in France and Germany a century and a quarter ago. But the changes which followed upon the Industrial Revolution of 1761 did not stop at France and Germany, they reached Great Britain as well; and the United Kingdom of 1840 hardly resembled the country governed by Lord North more closely than the France of Bonaparte resembled the old regime. By parity of reasoning if the changes in social equilibrium which are now in progress tend to disintegrate institutions elsewhere, they can hardly fail to revolutionize those existing here.
Decentralization is always relatively cumbersome and costly; and our system inherited from another age is a system of decentralization. I wish to make my meaning clear. I am expressing no preference; I am trying to apply past experience to present affairs. I will illustrate my theory by the condition of our industries.
Some years ago when Americans first began to attack the problems of industrial consolidation upon a large scale, great advantages were anticipated from merger not only because of economics in wages and rent, but because of the cheapness of dealing in bulk. Every one knows that better rates can be made by the car-load than by the ton, and by the train-load than by the car. I fancy it will not be denied that these expectations have been but imperfectly realized, and that the cost of operating the average consolidation does not show the expected saving over the cost of operating the component companies separately. I might cite many examples but one will suffice. I will take the United States Steel. The history of this corporation seems to show that the point has been nearly reached when, with men trained as are ours, the mass consolidated transcends administrative powers, and accordingly waste balance savings.
That the President of the United States Steel Company was unequal to his task is obvious, and requires no comment, save in so far as his failure illustrates a principle. He is, I am disposed to think, a type of a class.
For many years we have addressed ourselves to creating special ists, and we have outgrown the specialist. No man can now be successful in the conduct of modern enterprises who cannot generalize, and generalize upon broad foundations. The president of the Steel Trust was a typical specialist, and, being a specialist, he could not grasp general conditions. He broke down. As the head of a department he would have succeeded.
Society is a mechanism which obeys mechanical laws, and changes in administrative methods must coincide with development. Suppose we grow in the next three generations with all energy only equal to the energy developed by England during the last three, and we have this result. In 18ot the population of London, in round numbers, was a million. In 1901 that of the Metropolitan District exceeded 6,500,000. If New York and Chicago expand only in the same ratio they will contain by 2001 between 15,000,000 and 25,000,000 inhabitants. I incline to believe that our society is no more competent to deal with such masses till English society of the eighteenth century would have been to deal with whit now exists. English life and English education have been completely changed in a century. For these reasons, if we are to succeed in the gigantic task to which we must address our selves, I am convinced that we must accept radical innovations, an we must be provided with men of the highest administrative capacity. If you look about you I conceive that you will draw the conclusion which I have drawn, that our failures have come from imperfect generalizations and our successes from our superiority, in administrative methods. If you examine the cause of the defeat, of our acutest men of business last year in the coal strike, you will see in the end that they miscalculated the forces to which they were opposed, because they were too highly specialized in a particular direction. Conversely our engineers in South Africa have distanced competitors, not because Americans are liked by the English, but because an American engineer is also a chemist and a mechanic, and can reduce his refractory ores as well as mine them so with our railroads, we have bred a type of man distinct from the men who manage railroads abroad. Hence success. Here it seems to me we reach the point where we can measure the responsibility of the Naval Staff of the United States. Foreign affairs are but the reflex of domestic conditions. The two are halves of a whole, they cannot be dissociated; and incapacity to appreciate our domestic phenomena and provide for their effect abroad may be fatal. It may be fatal, as the battle of Trafalgar was fatal to France. But if war is the fiercest form of economic competition, it is an effect of causes which may be recognized beforehand, as certainly as the approach of rate-cutting by railways.
If you will look back through history you will perceive the part played by the military mind in the adjustment of human society. The reason is that the military mind when not narrowed to a specialty, but broadened by a varied training, has proved the most powerful of administrative agents.
Alexander was a military genius, but he was something more. He was a great economist. Other Greeks might have captured Tyre, but Alexander's capital conception was not so much the attack on a stronghold, as the relation of eastern and western exchanges. He comprehended the value of the direct route to India. He founded Alexandria, threw Phoenicia and Babylon into eccentricity, and thereby changed the equilibrium of the World.
So with Caesar. Caesar did not establish the Roman Empire through the victory of Pharsalia, for no amount of victories would alone have created a stable equilibrium between the East and West. Caesar's power lay in his grasp of the fact that the civilization in which he lived could not consolidate until it had broadened its base by absorbing Gaul. Study the map and the history for yourselves, and the more you ponder on Caesar's voluntary exile for years before he made his final attack upon Rome, the more you will be penetrated with admiration for that far-reaching intellect which seized upon the correlation of the parts of the society which he was to regenerate, when his generalizations would have seemed insanity to his contemporaries.
Permit me a last example. No platitude is more popular than denunciation of the conqueror and the military despot, and none is flimsier. The soldier does not create a despotism; despotism is the fruit of a social condition. The soldier when he organizes a society upon a despotic basis conforms to the conditions before him; but if these are unfavorable to despotism, and he proposes to succeed, he establishes a republic or some other kind of government. Government is a means to an end, and that end is the preservation of property and order.
Study the career of Washington. I take it the least part of our nation's debt to Washington is due for services in the field; his chief work was organization and administration. Certainly Washington was no despot, and yet Washington would hardly have hesitated to use force to prevent the Confederation from lapsing into the condition of a South American republic, had force been needful to attain such an end. Washington was a Republican, but he was first of all a practical man, and an administrator. Washington, like Alexander, or Caesar, or Cromwell, understood the society in which he lived and adapted himself thereto. That he could do this proved him to be no visionary but truly great, as his predecessors had been great before him. His sagacity contributed more than any other single factor to the adoption of the constitution, and through the adoption of the constitution to the construction of the foundation of a great administrative system.
That system we and our descendants must complete, and, miles; I greatly err, in the process of construction the Naval Staff of the United States must face responsibilities more serious than any it has heretofore borne. Among these must stand in the front rank the adjustment of military force to the exigencies of economic competition.
I have given you my reasons for supposing that we are approaching serious changes. Probably we are already in an era of transition. When the critical moment arrives the revolution may pass in tranquility as when Washington became president; or it may be a convulsion like the terror of 1793 in France. How it is precipitated often depends upon the fortune of war. A military catastrophe sometimes works as did the overthrow of France in 1870, which was followed by the commune of Paris; and even supposing such a misfortune to be averted a reverse may be decisive of a nation's destiny. Defeat often comes from ignorance of the nature of an emergency. I recur to the example of Great Britain. I am convinced that, from an economic standpoint, Charles Townshend's policy was sound. The vice of the undertaking lay in the execution. Had Lord North been endowed with Chatham's genius, had he chosen his opportunity and his issue with sagacity, had he selected officers like Marlborough or even Wellington, the result might have been different. The British suffered through the incapacity and ignorance of the official class. In the first place no competent minister would have engaged in a war in America without first having assured himself of the neutrality of France. In the second place no competent officers would have countenanced campaigns such as those actually undertaken. Or to put the proposition in other words, the staff should have been in a position to advise the government that they would not be answerable for consequences, unless the neutrality of France were guaranteed, and a force put at their disposal strong enough to crush the revolt forthwith.
The Duke of Wellington acted thus in 1814. When consulted by Lord Liverpool, Wellington wrote: "That which appears to me to be wanting in America is * * * a naval superiority on the Lakes." "In regard to your present negotiations, I confess that I think you have no right, from the state of the war, to demand any concession of territory from America." That ended the discussion within the cabinet, and the treaty of Ghent was signed.
Wellington spoke with authority because he was something beside a soldier. He was a man of the world. A man used to diplomacy as well as to war. In short, a man of the class of Caesar, of Cromwell and of Washington. Our danger is in the character of our education which makes men too special. Civilians are apt to consider officers as men whose opinion is of value only within their own department, largely because officers are prone to confine their attention somewhat exclusively to military affairs.
Such tendencies, I conceive, if fostered, will be a menace in the future, for time presses and we must not only mature a policy, but prepare for action. In ten years the canal will be finished and then, if I am right in my inferences, trade-routes will begin to change, and with a change in trade-routes will come a recentralization of civilization. New strategic positions will acquire importance and new regions will be developed. Reflect on what has followed upon the experiment at Suez, and Suez involved no revolution so radical as that contemplated by piercing Panama and throwing South America into the arena, as Africa has been thrown since 1870.
To me, as I have said, the preliminary step seems clear. Self-preservation would prompt me to defend the integrity of Korea and the Chinese Empire, if necessary, by arms, since by so doing we should be sure of allies, and should be certain to divide our competitors more radically than they are divided now. I do not apprehend, however, that we should be driven to war. The mere certainty that we should be ready to resist would work in China as it has worked nearer home. We, with our allies, would be too strong to be defied.
Yet assuming so much to be conceded, the expedient is only temporary, we have attained to nothing permanent.
We have before us problems whose magnitude cannot be exaggerated, and whose complexion changes with bewildering rapidity. If the United States is to fulfill her apparent destiny and become the converging point of trade-routes and the seat of energy and empire, our successors must not only be able to handle masses by the side of which those which now oppress us will be small, but they must have means of reaching their decisions with rapidity and precision. To that end we must have men trained as specialists, and yet capable of generalizing.
I have met officers of several foreign services, and I have concluded that ours are the most efficient for two reasons: First he' cause they have a broader basis of instruction to start with; and second, because terms of shore duty enable them to keep abreast of the movement of their time. Yet if I may hazard such an opinion I should conjecture that the principle upon which our military education proceeds might be expanded and improved.
All naval officers must, I suppose, be seamen and strategists but all cannot be thorough in mathematics, in mechanics, in chemistry, in metallurgy, in international law, and in the many other branches which now are included in the sphere of a naval education. He who should attempt to compass this would be superficial. What I should imagine might be a practical solution of the difficulty would be to encourage a certain degree of specialization without abandoning the foundation necessary to enable every man to correlate for himself the different departments of his profession. Each student at Annapolis might be required to attain to a certain minimum in all branches, after which the time saved from certain uncongenial studies might be given to others in which he excelled. The officer might thus become a profound specialist, and yet remain an intelligent administrator.
You need scientific men in the navy, as well as practical seamen, but you also need economists and historians, for without these you will be weak in a vital point. You will lack a channel of communication with the public, and such a channel is essential both to you and to the nation. You must be able not only to formulate your conclusions, but to state the steps by which you reach them, in order that you may be able to demonstrate the necessity of the armaments you advise.
As life grows more complex men must acquire increased versatility. Think of the interval which separates you from the generation which produced Hull and Decatur, and estimate what a body of diversified intelligence a naval staff must represent before this century shall be old. More especially is this true in America, where our public is both vast and intensely occupied with private business. We have no permanent section of the population whose birth naturally leads them to participate in public affairs. Neither have we a trained corps of experts. Theoretically the relations of a nation with foreign countries should appertain to the domain of diplomacy, but practically modern life is too fast for old methods. Even supposing a trained service to exist, as abroad, it answers little purpose now, so far as leading opinion goes. The tendency is for men to enter the diplomatic service young, grow old amid narrow circles in foreign capitals, and lose connection with the great currents of competition which agitate the world of practical affairs.
Officers of our navy travel throughout the world, they are stationed abroad to observe other civilizations, they return home at regular intervals and there they are apt to be thrown into active relations with many of the great industries of the country, above all they are always under the responsibility of being answerable with their lives for inaccuracies in their work. Add to this that they are a self-perpetuating corporation, and not only practically choose their successors, but educate them from boyhood.
Such a corps of men, with such advantages, who would give a portion of their energy to a study of the economic side of war, on the principle that war is a form of competition in the struggle for survival among nations, could hardly fail in time to gain the confidence of the public. They would do so because they would be competent, and because their judgment would be impartial and not warped from year to year by impending elections. Their doctrines would finally be crystallized and become the common property of each successive administration and congress, very much as the Monroe Doctrine would be supported as loyally by a Democratic as by a Republican cabinet.
The Naval Staff would speak with authority, as any high official speaks, and they would always represent the interests of the whole nation apart from domestic politics. No private individual could ever have such weight, and few public men have either the taste or the time to be thorough in abstract matters which require severe and sustained application; even when such men are to be found, they stand alone. They do not form a school whose traditions pass from generation to generation. I make no apology for these suggestions, for, as a citizen, I feel that the efficiency of the navy touches my personal safety. My country may at any hour be involved in war against serious odds, and her chance of victory will then be proportionate to her preparation, and her preparation to the intelligence with which she has been taught to estimate the possibilities of the future. In my judgment national efficiency rests on national intelligence, and my conviction is that the American people will never act intelligently in the matter of self-defense until they have trained their naval stall to be their guide in regard to the probabilities of war, and then have learned to trust them.
I do not insult you by intimating that your country does not have the most perfect confidence in you where active hostilities are concerned. I know not what would become of us, could We suppose that an emergency could arise in which our navy would not do its duty; but we need something more than this, for the most devoted and the ablest men can only accomplish that which they have the means to do. We must give you the means to fight our battles for us, if we are to look to you for victory. The question then arises, what are those means, and, I believe, in this matter that you must be the judge; but to be recognized as the Judge you must be able to convince your contemporaries by reasoning which appeals to them. Whence came Washington's power? I am clear that his power over his generation lay in the conviction of those whom he advised, that he was a shrewd and far-sighted man of affairs, who knew how to make a bargain, and disliked waste. If he spent money, he spent it where he expected a return. That return might be distant, but, as far as human foresight could go, men felt that Washington's judgment was sound. So it should be with you. If war be one phase of economic competition, then economic conditions become to you important as the basis of campaigns, and trade-routes are factors in strategy. Other things being equal, that force will prevail which is best equipped, and your equipment must depend upon the supplies granted you by a commercial community. You have a double reason, therefore, for addressing yourselves to these problems; the first is to obtain for yourselves the most accurate ideas of the probable character of the wars in which you may engage; the second is to demonstrate to the public their stake in the conflict.
Unless I am wholly in error, safety lies in being able to concentrate superior force at the point where rival trade-routes converge. Had the English comprehended this axiom they would not have suffered Braddock's defeat, not lost the thirteen colonies.
Common sense indicates that if you convince the public that you understand their economic interests, and that you only ask to insure their lives and their property, you will be granted what appropriations you may need.
What I deprecate is a dangerous jealousy of the soldier which is an ancient inheritance partly bred from the fact that military then use a language apart from the language of commerce. From generation to generation the tradition has been transmitted that certain wicked and cruel monsters have enslaved their kind from ambition or ostentation. I doubt if such men have ever lived, for great events turn not on such trivial causes. If a conqueror exists he exists because the conditions of his time demand that he should be evolved, and previously those same conditions must have evolved an army. Armies are created by necessity, not by caprice; and Augustus did not rule Rome by his own volition, but because order and property could by no other means be defended so cheaply and so well.
Take the case of Napoleon. Napoleon was raised to the throne by Frenchmen because they were fighting for their lives and fortunes against England. It was a question of national supremacy. That issue decided, Napoleon fell, war ceased, and France presently became a republic; but when she became a republic she definitely laid aside her old ambitions.
As between America and those whose interests clash with hers, one side must yield, and the only argument to which men have yet submitted when the great prizes of life were at stake, is the argument of force. He who is unarmed is the slave and the victim of the soldier; while he who is armed shares in the fruit of victory. Once admit these premises and the conclusions are irresistible. Safety lies in strength. When nations have thus learned to appreciate human limitations, the position of the military services is impregnable.
One word and I have done. If my forecast is at all correct administration is the paramount necessity of the future. To enable America to achieve her destiny she must create administrators stronger than any who have lived heretofore. I submit that all history proves that the greatest administrators have been soldiers, wherefore I infer that the military education stimulates the administrative faculty.
The civil education has paid little heed to such matters. If a civilian becomes an administrator he does so almost in spite of his instruction, and because the accident of after life has thrown him where he was incited to learn. He might begin in a railway manager's office, but if he rose, his rise would be due to his own talent and energy, and not to previously acquired aptitude.
We all know that from the day a boy enters Annapolis to the day when he retires from the service as an admiral, he is busied with administration in some of its varied forms; but I believe that much might still be done to elevate this department of Instruction in the public esteem. In this respect civil institutions must long be pupils of the military, and the navy of the United States could do no greater public service than by establishing and giving prominence to a standard of administrative instruction which schools and colleges might eventually try to emulate.
Look where we will, the field which opens before the American navy is vast and demands alike the highest powers of the mind, and the intensest effort. I firmly believe no century has ever unfolded more superb possibilities than the twentieth century will unfold to you; but, conversely, your responsibilities are at least commensurate with your opportunity. Your task is to carry your country through the dangers which will beset her as she climbs the path to economic supremacy; a path in which errors such as those committed by England in 1774 may be fatal.
As Washington said a century and a quarter ago: "It is to be regretted that Democratical States must always feel before they see," for "it is this which makes their government slow." In my judgment this failing constitutes our chief danger, for modern life is fast. Modern warfare requires not only a highly scientific body of trained men to act as officers, but modern fleets take many years to build. On the other hand, when the blow falls, it falls suddenly. In a few days a decisive battle may be fought, as the French found in the campaign of 1870. Safety therefore lies in patient preparation and in rapid action. Such being my opinion I cannot too strongly urge upon you, as one of your weightiest duties, your responsibility toward your country in this behalf. A portion of your task should be to foresee and explain the action of those competing currents of trade which, When brought into conflict, must, as a condition of survival, make it necessary to take and hold certain dominant positions. That means war unless one party is too strong to be attacked. To perform this function you must, in a degree, become popular teachers, for on you, more than on any other class of the community, devolves the task of eradicating prejudices, and of diffusing intelligent ideas on this great class of subjects with which you, of all men, are most competent to deal.