Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/161

 for the Ameer of Afghanistan is a part of America, just like the mining engineer driving a tunnel in Colorado. At this moment, that larger America is spreading. There is a new movement in world-industry. Instead of bringing the raw material to the power, men are beginning to bring the power to the raw material. India raises much first-rate cotton: she has also inexhaustible resources of labor. Hitherto, she has sold the raw cotton to England, where the coal is; now, India is going to spin and weave part of this cotton beside her own fields, partly with native water-power, partly with imported coal. We have the money of the world; and American capital has been flowing by hundreds of millions into such projects as this. If we are to have the perfect defence, we must prepare to back up American citizens and “American interests” in India as well as in Indiana, in New Guinea as well as in New York. It is hard, it is almost impossible, to draw the line; so we are pulled insensibly into the old, vicious circle.

There comes a point in any thorough military preparation when the spirit of defence runs subtly into the spirit of offence. Again, Germany is the typical case. She was, her emperors, kings and generals said, “ringed with foes.” That, in the beginning, was not an entirely insincere presentation of the case. On one side lay France, smarting with the injustice of 1870; on another lay the barbaric Russia of the Czars, with double Germany’s