Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/727

Rh a considerable increase in population has occurred. During the same period, freedom, the essential condition of growth, has made many conquests. The Inquisition has been abolished. Religious toleration, with a free press and free speech, has been established. The right of association has been recognized. The most onerous and odious of the industrial regulations of centuries of despotism have been repealed. Indeed, the conditions of social evolution are more favorable in Spain than in any of the great continental countries. To be sure, she has, like Russia, Germany, France, and Italy, a powerful and corrupt bureaucratic system; but she does not have to bear the burdens of an immense standing army, nor is she subjected to its centralizing and demoralizing influences. Unlike Russia and Germany, she does not have a ruler that seeks to impose his will upon her people, and to force them to live in disregard of their wishes. The bitter class hatreds born of militancy do not exist in Spain that exist in Finance. Although the Spanish population is poor, it has not, as in Italy, been driven by misgovernment and destitution to brigandage and insurrection.

While it can not be denied that England and the United States are nations in a state of rapid evolution, their evolution is not taking place in the way usually supposed. It is not by acquisitions of foreign territory that nations grow great and powerful. Such acquisitions may be signs of decay, and, like certain tumors, hasten death. If they are due to the militant impulse—the progenitor of the new colonies of France and Germany—and require standing armies to keep them in subjection, causing a heavy drain upon the resources of the mother country, they are a source of weakness. What constitutes the greatness of England and the United States is the increase of their populations, the capacity of these populations for private initiative, the development of their resources, the discovery of new methods of production, the improvement of old methods of distribution, the generous rewards bestowed upon toil, the deference shown for the rights of others—in a word, the more perfect adjustment of life to the conditions of existence. Were it not for a change of policy that has occurred in both countries, this adjustment would continue until the soil had been forced to yield the largest product and the population had reached its maximum in numbers, industrial skill, and social amelioration. But this change is destroying freedom; it is checking social mobility; it is increasing the functions and regulations of government; it is adding to the army of militant and bureaucratic parasites; it is preventing labor from receiving its highest reward and the individual from attaining his greatest happiness; to sum up, it is bringing about just such a state as is deplored in Turkey and China and working the ruin of Italy and France. The money taken from the individual and spent in ways not his own has reached an enormous sum, and is constantly increasing. The discontent and animosity growing out of this aggression are increasing in a like degree, taking the form of labor insurrections, agitations for the depreciation of the currency, and the robbery of the rich under the cover of inquisitorial and confiscatory taxes in support of schemes for the benefit of the poor. In the United States more particularly, there has been a rapid development of the militant spirit, which demands the adoption of an imperial policy of aggression and colonial expansion,