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parliamentary reform and a greater exercise of the right of suffrage in European countries is due to the example set by the United States. Manhood suffrage in England has proceeded at a rapid pace. Even the despotisms, as we call the governments of continental Europe, have advanced in parliamentary reform, and the people have their rights in the Reichstag, and in the Cortes, and throughout Europe in every direction. This is largely the fruit of our example.

There is a difference between extending nationality and extending empire. You can extend your power, but if you want to extend your nationality, extend your institutions, extend your liberty, you must do it with people of your own kind. They are the ones to be governed by your law. Every other extension is a weakness. Every extension of the sort that is contemplated in this case is a crime. You cannot obliterate the nationality of 10,000,000 Malays.

Great Britain has held India for two hundred and fifty years, and yet there are there but six hundred thousand Englishmen all told. Wherever there has been a strong nationality in the tropics adapted to the soil and to the climate, no other nationality has ever been able to exterminate or govern them except by physical force. Our nationality cannot extend to this Pacific group of islands. Our power can go there; our flag can float there; but the genius of American liberty will remain upon our shores. It cannot be implanted there. The material is not there for it to flourish and grow upon.

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Is that the sort of "expansion we want? Is that the sort of empire we are derided as old fogies and little Americans for not desiring to establish? Mr. President, we are told that duty and destiny and some undefinable power are pushing us on to a splendid and magnificent future that the fathers never dreamt of. This evil thing we are called on to do cannot be painted in

such bright, dazzling colors as to deceive the American eye. It is nothing but a wanton stretch of power. It is lust for power and greed for land veneered with the tawdriness of false humanity. You cannot hide its hideousness with the clothing of high-sounding phrases. You cannot prostitute the flag made to float over freedom by driving under its folds millions of slaves.

I want no despotism, sir. I do not want our country to be poisoned at the core. I do not want our people to be accustomed to the exercise of unlimited authority by Congress. That is a poison which has sapped the life of all republics, and it will sap the life of our Republic. If you destroy the germ of our institution you destroy the government built on the germ.

W. BOURKE COCKRAN

[Extracts from a speech delivered before the Students' Lecture Association of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, February 4, 1899.]

I.

EVILS OF A STANDING ARMY

STANDING armies always have been and always must be fatal to free institutions. To realize the utter incompatibility of militarism and republicanism we have but to look at France. When we recall the first French Republic scattering the combined forces of Europe through the valor of its volunteer armies, how pitiful is the spectacle of the third Republic cowering in abject fear of its own standing army, incapable of wielding any influence abroad, impotent even to do justice at home. The experience of this country proves that a citizen soldiery is invincible against foreign aggression or domestic insurrection, while all history shows that a mercenary soldiery has never been so formidable to any country as the one which supports it. A standing army in the long run has always become helpless against foreign foes, but it has always remained of deadly efficiency against domestic liberties. The soldier in war may be a hero, the soldier in peace is either useless or dangerous. The camp

may be a school of virtue and patriotism, the barracks are always asylums of laziness and often hotbeds of vice. The moral law is binding on nations as well as

on individuals. A violation of it by either is always followed by retribution, slow perhaps, but inexorably stern. He who draws the sword will perish by the sword, and the republic that establishes a standing army to smite freedom in other lands will live to find her own liberties trampled in the dust under the feet of a mercenary soldiery.

Aside from its inherent hostility to free institutions, a standing army is a crushing burden on the neck of the laborer, because it operates to reduce his earning capacity while at the same time he is forced to bear the whole expense of its maintenance. The first essential of high wages is abundance of commodities, and a standing army is an insuperable obstacle to extensive production. The volume of production depends on the number of hands employed in labor and the amount of capital available to promote their efficiency. Capital has been well defined as stored-up labor. A man without capital can labor, but not effectively. With his bare hand he might turn over a few feet of earth in the course of a day, but with a plough he can cultivate several acres in the same period. The plough itself is the fruit of labor formerly expended, and, therefore, the laborer using it or any other implement is but utilizing the labor of other days to reinforce the labor of to-day.

Since the efficiency of the laborer depends, not solely on the labor of his own hands, but largely on the amount of stored-up labor which he can employ to reinforce his natural capacity, any policy which tends to dissipate capital in unproductive enterprises is a direct assault on his prosperity. Every dollar of surplus product or capital invested in implements, in machinery, in buildings, is a fruitful dollar. Commodities used in production multiply themselves even while they perish. Every dollar expended for munitions of war is a sterile dollar. It is not used for the

purpose of production, but for the purpose of destruction. It is wasted as completely as if it were thrown into the sea.

The soldier, whether in barracks or in camp, is withdrawn from the field of industry. His own hands add nothing to the product of the country. His pay and his sustenance must, therefore, be drawn from the product of others. The laborer is the sole producer. On him must fall the whole cost of a military establishment. In other words, a standing army imposes upon each laborer the burden of supporting two men -himself and a soldier-while at the same time it diminishes his earning capacity by dissipating the capital on which his productive efficiency depends.

But far worse than the spoliation of the laborer is the degradation which he suffers from a standing army. Militarism has always despised industry. Nothing can be more natural than the contempt in which the industrious man who pays for a showy uniform is held by the idle wearer of it. The whole literature of the militant ages reflects this contempt. Until very recent years the workman was never mentioned in print except as a villain, a serf, a beggar or some other term so opprobrious that the expressed "base mechanic" seems by contrast like a respectful description.

The establishment of this Republic, based on the equality of all men before the law, has worked many changes in social conditions, but none so remarkable as the change in the condition of the laborer. For one hundred and twenty years we have held him to be the best citizen who by the labor of his good right arm caused two blades of grass to grow where one grew before-him to be the best patriot who bears the most effective part in the great scheme of industrial cooperation, which is called civilization. We have not trusted our security to mercenary soldiers, and we have

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