purpose, they must be confronted with a very great issue indeed. They feel their insignificance, the supererogatory nature of their functions, and it is only perhaps natural that they should cling to their dwindling powers and their futile privileges: even if both be for evil, as retarding national solidarity. Consequently, there has arisen in America a demand for such amendments of the Constitution as will enable Congress to legislate upon these subjects, absurdly forbidden to it by the jealousies and intercolonial distrust of 1789. But, in order to secure an amendment to the Constitution, a measure must be proposed by both Houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority, or by a convention called on application of legislatures of twothirds of the States, and after being so proposed must be introduced into the legislatures of all the States, and be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. At present, it must be confessed, a large number of the States, of at least two-thirds, would be opposed to any constitutional amendment increasing federal power. Nevertheless, already Congress possesses much more power under the Constitution than it commonly exercises. Emergencies may conceivably arise when it may exert this power, or any degree of power of which a modern interpretation of the Constitution is capable, and if this were in the public and national interest it would be universally applauded, just as the President's incursions into the legislative domain have been received with approval. A great deal of the time of the various State legislatures has of late years been occupied in considering schemes of a more or less socialistic character, but so far the champions of even those measures which have been approved in England have met with scant success. The paternalism of the local governments has evinced itself more in petty legislation of the "curfew," anti-barmaids and anti-bacillus-in-the-razors type; the establishment of Government breweries and bakeries would require a stronger pressure of opinion than now exists. Municipal trading and municipal ownership has never obtained much footing in America, nor is it likely to do so. The reasons urged against the practice are chiefly, as stated by Mr. R. P. Porter, the injurious effect upon the work strictly within the municipal sphere of operation; the fact that in giving attention to trading operations the "unproductive" work is almost certain to be neglected; the tendency to discourage improvement or development; the engendering of illfeeling which is sure to arise when the taxpayer finds himself obliged to help defray the cost of competing with himself, the difficulty in adjusting the burden of a trading undertaking on the right shoulders, and such an equitable regulation of the charge as will not put a burden on those who derive no benefit; the impossibility of drawing a line as to which industries shall be taken up by the municipalities, and which shall be left to individual enterprise.1 1 "How is it," once asked Lord Goschen, "that while the increasing democracy at home is insisting, with such growing eagerness, on more control by the State, we see so small a corresponding development of the same principle in the United States? It is clearly not simply the democratic spirit which demands so much central regulation. Otherwise, we should find the same conditions in the Anglo-Saxon democracies across the sea.”— Address at Edinburgh, 1883. It is true that early in the last century the various State Governments of America did enter into financial partnership with the promoters of canals; and later, when steam railways were introduced, States and cities and towns and counties alike were appealed to for assistance in building railways. Nor was the appeal unheeded, for in the forties and fifties an epidemic, very similar to the present fever for municipal trading in England swept over the country, and ended in bankruptcy and ruin, not only of cities and towns, but of important States. Bonds issued by State and local authorities for the promotion of railways went in default. These and kindred experiences taught them the useful lesson that there was a limit to State and municipal credit. The taxpayers of those times, who saw their property practically confiscated to pay for enterprises which should have been left to individual endeavour or private speculators, invented a device known as "the Debt-limit Clause," and this clause, in some form or other, had been inserted in nearly every State Constitution drawn and adopted since those days of financial disaster and destruction of State and local credit. Partly owing to debt limitation and partly because private enterprise had been allowed a freer headway in such undertakings as the supply of gas, electric lighting, tramways, and telephones, there is to-day in America no city owning and operating its own tramways and street railways, probably less than half a dozen manufacturing gas, a very few engaged in supplying electric light, and not one in the telephone business. CHAPTER VI THE NEW DIPLOMACY WE pass now from America's territorial expansion and domestic law-making to consider her new foreign relations. America has somewhat blindly and naïvely entered the international arena. Her advantages are her wealth and rude strength; her disadvantages are those inseparable from democracy, from the peculiar formation of her Government, from ignorance of usage, want of political continuity, and from a too-exalted conception of her own position and destiny. Thus hampered, it is inevitable she must make in this new business more enemies than friends. It is the chief purpose and the truest province of diplomacy to make friends. Friends mean good-will, good-will means markets, markets prosperity, prosperity domestic peace and more intellectual and spiritual expansion. Let us now see if American policy is calculated to encompass these great ends. Diplomacy-respect for another nation's rightsregard for legality; comity, the jus gentium-is all so new to Americans that it is small wonder they stumble. 1 Signor Bonamico has said that America will necessarily become an aggressive military power, and anticipates its eventual solidarity with the Dual Alliance. "What have we to do with foreigners and treaties?" once asked the eminent Senator Matthews.1 Washington's Farewell Address is commonly summarized as "advice to steer clear of European entanglements." Consequently, without reading that document, a large body of Americans conceive that it recommends national isolation and advises against alliances of any sort with any European nation. But, as a matter of fact, Washington merely considered as entangling any European alliance which should make America the vassal of any other; any alliance in which his country should be an unequal partner and dependant. He contemplated temporary alliances on a footing of equality, but counselled against permanent ones, because the relative strength of nations is not a fixed equality, but constantly fluctuates. "It is," said he, our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." "Again," he says, "It must be unwise for us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her (Europe's) politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships and enmities," clearly implying that time might bring ties 1 To show what a quantité negligeable America was in international matters before the war, we need only refer to the experience of their Minister to China so recently as 1894. "So far did the idea that we ought to take no part in foreign questions extend," says Mr. Denby, "that some of my colleagues at Pekin, when I undertook to make peace for China and Japan, deprecated any intervention whatever of the United States in the affairs of the Far East." He proceeds, "We hold our heads higher now. We are coming to our own. stretching out our hands for what nature meant should be ours. taking our proper rank among the nations of the world; we are after markets -the greatest markets now existing in the world,” etc., etc. We are We are |