Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/682

662 undeveloped, they felt, as does every free industrial nation before its apostasy, that too many strangers anxious to better their lot could not come among them and share their blessings. But after the curse of militancy had inclined them, as it inclined the republic of Athens and that of the Dutch, to proscription, they began to change their attitude toward aliens. From the policy of excluding the products of foreign labor, they passed to the policy of excluding foreign labor itself. At the same time they sought to justify themselves with the specious logic that springs from war. Though always contentious of the inevitable triumph of their civilization, they declared that it could not withstand the invasion of Oriental habits and customs. In the face of the fact that no amount of knowledge ever transformed vice into virtue, they insisted that without the test of literacy to bar the ignorance and crime of Europe, the institutions of the republic could not survive. Nothing more hypocritical can be found in the pleas of any of the great brigands of history for their assaults upon the rights or territory of the people ill fated enough to evoke their envy or hatred.

The step from attacking foreigners by prohibitory tariffs and immigration laws to attacking them by means more direct is only a short one. That the American people have taken it already once or twice, and are about to take it again, need cause no surprise. When they were under the domination of slavery, a militant institution stimulative of aggression, it was but yielding to the barbarous impulse that possessed them to annex Texas, to wrest from Mexico a vast domain, and to seek to own the island of Cuba. It was but yielding to the same hateful impulse when, a few years after the close of the civil war, they tried to make Santo Domingo a part of the Union. That act of apostasy to the principles of a free democracy was only averted by the courageous efforts of the few men in public life that still felt profoundly the truths of the Farewell Address. Since then, however, the teachings of Washington have again fallen into disrepute. In the clamor for a "vigorous foreign policy" and the annexation of Hawaii, we have another manifestation of the spirit of aggression that nerved the arm of the slave driver as he wielded the lash and fired him with lust for the lands of other peoples.

The impulse toward despotism since the outbreak of the civil war has not been confined to the Federal Government. The forces of aggression let loose by that terrific struggle have passed to every part of the body politic. It has seemed, in fact, as if they gathered momentum as they became diffused. While the States have not, as already said, encroached upon the rights of the central authority, they have ravaged like flames the field of individual rights. History