THE NEXT WORLD-POWER by Henry Demarest Lloyd

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 24, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 30.

THE NEXT WORLD-POWER.

By Henry Demarest Lloyd

[By Henry Demarest Lloyd, author of “Wealth against Commonwealth,” “Newest England,” etc., in New York Independent, May 16, 1901.]

WHEN the news reached Germany of the new steel trust in America, the stocks of the iron and steel mills listed on the Berlin Bourse fell, and they continue depressed. Some of these establishments are superior in their technic to some of the most important concerns in the American combination—in the saving of the by-products of coke-making, for instance. They are large enough and have capital enough to realize all the economies of “large-scale production.” They have a high tariff wall around their preserve. But the American concerns have many times more money than they have. Money is the sinews of war, and competition nowadays is not political economy, but war. The similar flutter among the British iron and steel men; the eagerness of British speculators in Capel Court to invest in the new steel stocks, altho they are shares in a worse than Jameson raid on the chief industry of their own country; the entrance of one of our most successful street railway entrepreneurs into the field of London transit, the announcement that the millionaires’ club who have been consolidating American railroads are now making their plans to consolidate the English railways, the fact that important American manufacturers are sapping and mining the tariff fortifications of their competitors by establishing works within France and Germany—all these point to one great piece of news—the coming capitalistic conquest of Europe by America. I meet journalists, statesmen, professors, who have been pitying America because so helpless in the grasp of its plutocracy, but who are now dismayed as it dawns on them that their own countries are the next victims. The American trusts are a European question as well as American. The monopolists who have conquered us are now going to conquer our European cousins. I discover no sign of any adequate power of resistance here in the governments or the business men. After careful inquiry I can not find that even the Socialist leaders of Germany are ready to advocate anything that would be “thorough.”

The capitalistic evolution of America, unimpeded by the distractions that have divided social and personal energy in Europe among many channels, and unhampered by tradition of Church, State, rank, noblesse oblige, richesse oblige, regard for the status quo, or personal ease, has bred not a new Cæsar, but a class of Cæsars. There is nowhere else, and never before has existed, such a set of men as the present rulers of American industry—nowhere men so strong, keen, unscrupulous, nowhere men with such a nose for dollars, nowhere men with so many dollars. Europe is too slow and too poor to withstand them. While it is talking, the Americans will be doing. The consolidation of the principal European industries with the American will be accomplished while the Europeans are still talking about what they would do if it should be attempted. The development of the trusts in America has been only the rehearsal; the real play is now about to begin on the stage of the world’s industry.

It is extremely interesting to note that the thought of Europe is running strongly toward international action in this emergency. A distinguished publicist of Switzerland, known also all over Europe as a literary man, laid before me a plan for such a movement. One of the leading professors of political economy here advocates the international regulation of prices as the public remedy, and co-operation as the private remedy. One of the intellectual leaders of the Belgian Socialists, who are the most advanced and practical Socialists in Europe, predicted to me that the middle class of continental Europe, where there still is a middle class, will prefer revolution to submitting to the business methods which they see destroying the middle class of America. A movement is being strongly pushed among the coal miners of Europe for an international regulation or control of the coal output by the miners of all countries; with the co-operation of the mine owners if they will join, without it if they will not. The Belgian and French miners are warm advocates of the plan; the German leaders at first opposed it, but have now taken it up and advocate it in their organ and at the meetings of the men. The Scottish Miners’ Federation has unanimously approved a provisional plan for it, which includes the eight-hour day, a living wage and an old-age pension. The nervous and impracticable talk about European alliances for tariff wars against the United States is another aspect of the general dovecote fright at the appearance here of the American industrial Alexander, sighing for more worlds to conquer, and more lucky than Alexander, destined to find them. Americans must wake up to the fact that they are being called upon to become international quite as inexorably by industrial forces as by their military policy.

Berlin, Germany.