i 9 2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



capital, and we have been borrowing money abroad to meet our needs 

 at home. Their inhabitants are idle for lack of employment; they 

 will respond to our capital. The United States is the natural market 

 for the West Indies; they lie close to our shores, and when the Nica- 

 ragua Canal comes they will be but islands in an American lake 

 parts of the industrial unit of Greater America. They can give U3 

 the things that are needed to round out our consumption, and we can 

 do the same for them. 



It is illogical and unlike American shrewdness to go seven thou- 

 sand miles for tropic lands when an equally valuable, a more valu- 

 able, area is within seven hundred miles of us. The comparison be- 

 comes even more striking when it is remembered that the control of 

 the Philippines brings to us a burden of problems from which indus- 

 trial development in this country is free. 



The Government at "Washington may spend our millions and 

 establish government in the Philippines, but will American capital 

 go there? Will our citizens invest their money seven thousand miles 

 away while tropic America is so much nearer, and is, moreover, an 

 equally rich and far more extended field? This does not assume the 

 conquest of American regions. It is not necessary to have govern- 

 mental control in order to profit by the industries of a country. The 

 conditions of modern industry prove this most conclusively. But for 

 this fact the progress of the world would have been much less rapid. 

 We have an example of this in American railroads: they have been 

 largely built by English capital; the same is also true to a greater 

 or less degree of many of our other industries. What England has 

 done in North America without governmental control, we can do in 

 Central and South America when our industrial condition demands 

 new areas to work over. By the modernized Monroe doctrine our 

 supremacy in this hemisphere is assured, and we have the guar- 

 antee of a clear field. Our interests are also furthered by our 

 friendly relations with the American peoples and by our nearness 

 to them. 



The American policy of our forefathers is the one for us, even 

 from the industrial point of view. America is an industrial unit, 

 an economic unit, full of undeveloped possibilities that await the 

 hand of American enterprise. Our resources can abundantly pro- 

 vide for our material needs. The continent is controlled by the 

 most ingenious of all the races, and is dominated by the highest politi- 

 cal ideals known to man. What need have we to reach out across 

 seven thousand miles of ocean to take lands populous with millions 

 of barbarians? 



