To a sceptical European, accustomed to the cant of international protestations, this boasted peacefulness of ours seems suspicious. "Have you," he might ask, "always been peaceful? Did you not fight England, Mexico and Spain? Have you not taken advantage of your neighbours' necessities?" Such a European might not regard Americans as a nation, divinely appointed to bring peace to a world rent by war. He might not acknowledge that we are more law-abiding than other peoples, freer from race hatreds, gentler towards the unfortunates of our own race. He might point to our lynchings and riots; to our unpunished murders of Chinese, Italians and Mexicans; to the system of repression, by which the Southern whites terrorized the freedmen after the Civil War. If Europe did not solve the Balkan problem in peace, did Americans end slavery without resort to arms?
We may not like these imputations, but it would be hard to deny that in certain national crises we have not been impossibly virtuous. We have not always subordinated our national interests to the ideal of setting a righteous example. What we wanted and could get we got, whether it was Florida, Texas, California or Panama. We were not above the twisting or even the breaking of a treaty, we did not discourage filibustering expeditions too rigorously, and we were never, never meek. Thus in 1818, to take a single example, we addressed to Spain a polite communication in which we asserted that "the United States can as little compound with impotence as with perfidy, and that Spain must immediately make her election, either to place (an adequate) force in Florida or cede to the United States a province, of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession." Many of our communications to Mexico, Chile, Spain, and even England were equally arrogant.
The truth is that our peace has been a peace of circumstances, due to a favouring geographical and economic situation. Our peacefulness came down to us like our rivers, farms and cities, a heritage of exceptional conditions. We were inaccessible to European armies. We were supreme on a fertile, sparsely settled continent. We could afford peace. Our resources were immensely great and if we did not reach out for more, it was because we already had as much as we could handle. What we did need we could take from weak peoples, and a nation which fights weak peoples need not be martial, just as a man who robs orphans need not be a thug.
It might have been different. Had our Westward progress been opposed by millions of Indians, had France been able to resist our march beyond the Appalachians, or Mexico stood like a disciplined Germany between us and the Westward Ocean, we should have developed a military civilisation. As our growing population pressed upon our narrow frontiers, we should have had our war scares, our border conflicts, our national hatreds, our huge standing army, and the whole paraphernalia of militarism.
Still another element, besides our geographical isolation and our economic self-sufficiency, contributed to our intactness and security and permitted us to indulge in the luxury of pacifism. Europe protected us from Europe. We were one and the European Powers many. So delicate was the balance that the European nations could not hazard a really serious trans-Atlantic venture. They had little to gain and much to lose by fighting us, as we had nothing to gain by fighting them. Our interest in such European affairs as the independence of Greece, Hungary and Poland was purely sentimental. Towards Europe we were peaceful as we were peaceful towards Mars. True, our safe orators delighted in twisting the lion's tail and upbraiding the Czar of all the Russias. During the eighty-three years between 1815 and 1898, however, we were never at war with a European nation.
It was not that we loved Europe too well. England we detested and hardly a decade passed without some acrid boundary dispute. We thought her arrogant, greedy, supercilious, and she thought us arrogant, greedy and coarse. Millions of Irish immigrants intensified this animosity and our national vanity did the rest. But though we hated England she was too formidable to be attacked. Therefore we bluffed and she bluffed, and in the end we compromised.
With other countries it was still easier to keep at peace. Prussia, Austria and the smaller German states were too distant to affect our interests. For Russia we had a vague attachment, and except on one occasion, she never threatened our ambitions. With France we were on good terms except during our Civil War. We disliked Spain and despised her, but events prevented our going to war with her.
It was because it paid that we kept at peace; any other policy would have been wasteful, even suicidal. Our future depended upon our ability to keep out of war. A sparse population on the edge of a vast continent, our hope of national success lay in an isolation, which would give us strength for future struggles. Our mission was to settle the empty lands to the West before other nations could pre-empt them. To embroil ourselves with strong powers was to court disaster, while even to interest ourselves in European politics would divert our mind from our own imperative task.
Our first American foreign policy, therefore was disentanglement. We often speak as though America passively abstained from entering European politics. We were, however, already a part of the unsteady balance of power, and warring France and England sought our aid, much as the two coalitions might seek the aid of a Bulgaria, not loving her but needing her help. It was a bold and above all a positive policy that Washington established when he broke the French treaty and declared our neutrality. Though denounced as dishonourable, this policy was essential to our welfare and peace, for the country was more dangerously divided in 1793 than in 1916.
How intimately our peace has depended upon our economic development is revealed by the early failure of this policy of disentanglement. Prior to 1812 our immediate economic interests overhung our territory and transcended our sovereignty. All Europe being at war, we were the neutral carriers of the world. Our ships brought merchandise to France from her colonies and allies, and goods from the West Indies and South America to all parts of Europe. In the decade ending 1801 our foreign trade, which was dependent upon the indulgence of Europe, more than quadrupled. The profits on our carrying trade were immense. Our shipbuilding industry increased, and not only were orders filled for our own foreign trade but many ships were manufactured for export. The prices of agricultural products almost doubled and our meat, flour, cotton and wool found a ready market in Europe. Our prosperity depended upon this newly created foreign trade. Sail-makers, ship-builders, draymen, farmers, merchants were dependent upon a trade which menaced the commercial supremacy of Great Britain and upon which even France looked with jealous apprehension.
It was this conflict of our interests with those of a stronger nation that brought on the bitter controversies with Great Britain, and resulted in the tedious war of 1812. We were more dependent upon Europe than Europe upon us, as was shown by the fiasco of our Embargo policy. England, determined to kill our commerce, would have fought many years to accomplish this purpose. But it did not prove necessary. Our commercial progress, that had been merely an incident in a European war, lessened after the peace. For us this was fortunate. Our future lay in our own continent, and not on the high sea where as a relatively weak nation, we should have been forced to compete with the world and war continually with England.
To-day, one hundred years later we are still pacific, because of the direction taken by our economic development since 1815. While we developed agriculture, constructed turnpikes, canals and railroads, manufactured for the home market, and filled up the country from the Appalachians to the Pacific, our American-borne commerce and our shipbuilding declined; by 1846, our American tonnage in foreign trade was less than in 1810. But the profits of this carrying trade were no longer necessary, since in exchange for our imports from Europe we could now export cotton. We were no longer competitors with Europe, but had become contributors to European prosperity. Prior to 1815 England looked upon us as a commercial rival; after 1815 we became the unconscious economic allies of all the industrial nations.
The extent to which our economic system had become complementary to the European economic system is illustrated by a study of the statistics of our foreign commerce. Of our exports one-half was raw cotton, and upon a steady supply of this fibre a great European industry depended. Later we shipped huge quantities of food which was also needed by the manufacturers across the sea. As our cotton area extended, as our wheat and meat exports increased, European, and especially British, industry profited. At the same time, despite our high tariffs we furnished an increasing market for wares manufactured in Europe, while our own manufactures did not largely compete in the world markets. Moreover the rapid development of our internal resources furnished lucrative investment opportunities