Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/138

126 this sudden desire of the French and Germans to get possession of the Chinese Empire? If they do not want it as an outlet for a surplus population or for a population ambitious to improve its condition, what do they want it for? The answer to these questions is to be found in the powerfully aggressive impulse imparted to them by their military and bureaucratic systems. As is well known, these systems inspire a contempt for industrial pursuits, which require private initiative and enterprise, and lead young men anxious to distinguish themselves to seek to do so in the army or the civil service, where they are cared for as recipients of pensions in case of failure. But in both Germany and France the number of places of this kind is necessarily limited, and as a consequence the demand has far exceeded the supply. A further consequence is that the tests applied to candidates for appointment have become very severe. A still further consequence is that after candidates have spent the best part of their lives in preparing themselves for a certain kind of work, and fail, as they often do, to get it, they consider themselves too old to prepare for anything else. Naturally they are inclined to join what Prince Bismarck has fitly stigmatized as the educated proletariat, and begin an agitation for the vague and absurd reforms known under the name of socialism and anarchism. If places could be found for such men and the country relieved of their disquieting presence by the establishment of a colonial empire in a land like China, where there is a vast industrious and docile population to be ruled and exploited, would not an enterprise of this kind appeal, consciously or unconsciously, to the leaders of a nation? Would not a vain and ambitious man, like the German emperor, see in it an opportunity not only to gain an outlet for the military activities of his people, but to make for himself a name that would compare with that of any of his Hohenzollern ancestors? What is true of him in a striking degree is true in a less degree of every other victim of the militant and bureaucratic spirit of France and Germany. China is wanted, therefore, not as a home for landless populations, but as a place for the soldiers and officials of these countries to pillage.

But, unless France and Germany change their policy, China will have her revenge. The time is certain to come with them, as it is certain to come with the American people, if their example be followed, when the same fate will, as Mr. Spencer predicts, overtake them that has overtaken their victim. Great standing armies of soldiers and officials, coupled with constant aggressions upon weaker nations, can not fail to produce again the same paralysis that made the Mexicans and Peruvians such easy prey for the Spaniards. The immutable law of biology, that benefit must always be commensurate with merit, and the equally immutable law of sociology, that militant institutions lead to foreign and domestic aggression and finally to national decay, can not be suspended. Even in the case of Spain, there has been an exemplification of this profound and important truth. Why should not the French, Germans, and Americans exemplify it, if they pursue the same career of shameless aggression?