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 occupied in the development of its own economic resources, it has from the beginning sought to promote the growth of Communism in other countries by an active subsidised propaganda. The Marxist. doctrines which Lenin imposed upon the Russian revolution demanded an international Communism as an essential, and though Stalin appears to have withdrawn any immediate extra-national policy, the Comintern, an international propagandist body, still operates from Moscow, presumably with the consent and assistance of the Soviet Government. It was the fear of this Communism issuing from Russia, and spreading among the working classes of Germany that frightened the upper owning classes into the substitution of a thinly-disguised, but very real, autocracy for the shallow democracy of the post-war era. Though Russian propaganda played a smaller part in Italy, it was the same fear and the same revolutionary movement that enabled Mussolini to rally the owning classes to his flag and to establish his political domination. In later cases prestige and power-politics combined with the economic interests of certain capitalist groups to stimulate a colonial policy of aggression associated with an internationalism of counter-revolution which calls for active intervention wherever Bolshevism appears to raise its head. Thus the isolated economic nationalism of tariffs, embargoes and other customs is found in active and combined collusion with an external policy of imperialism and of possible interference with the liberty of weaker nations to settle their own political and economic affairs.

The one apparent exception to the general trend of Imperialism is the United States. After the Spanish war had left her in possession of Cuba and other colonies she seemed committed to a genuine though limited Imperialism as distinct from the sort of protectorate over mid and south America conveyed by the Monroe Doctrine. But the