Impossible! These less fortunate, but not less aspiring nations would never agree to such a policy of national stagnation, to such a stifling of their legitimate longings for a “greater place in the sun.” They would point to the pages of history and show how small nations have become great and how empires have fallen. What was the mighty United States of America but yesterday? A handful of feeble colonies far weaker than the Balkan States to-day.
“Why should this particular moment be chosen,” they would protest, “to render immovable international frontiers that have always been shifting? Why should the maps of the world be now finally crystallised so as to give England millions of square miles in every quarter of the globe, Canada, Australia, India, Egypt, while we possess so little? Did God make England so much better than he made us? Why should the Russian Empire sweep across two continents while our territory is crowded into a corner of one? Is Russia so supremely deserving? And why should the United States possess as much of the earth’s surface as Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Roumania, Spain, Norway, Sweden and Japan all together and, besides that, claim authority to say, through the Monroe Doctrine, what shall happen or shall not happen in South America, Mexico, the West Indies and the Pacific? How did the United States get this authority and this vast territory? How did Russia get her vast territory? How did England get her vast territory?”
The late Professor J. A. Cramb, an Englishman himself, gives us one answer in his powerful and illuminating book, “Germany and England,” and shows us how England, in the view of many, got _her_ possessions:
England! The successful burglar, who, an immense fortune amassed, has retired from business, and having broken every law, human and divine, violated every instinct of honour and fidelity on every sea and on every continent, desires now the protection of the police!... So long as England, the great robber-state, retains her booty, the spoils of a world, what right has she to expect peace from the nations?
In reply to Mr. Bryan’s peace exhortations, some of the smaller but more efficient world powers, certainly Germany and Japan, would recall similar cynical teachings of history and would smilingly answer: “We approve of your beautiful international peace plan, of your admirable world police plan, but before putting it into execution, we prefer to wait a few hundred years and see if we also, in the ups and downs of nations, cannot win for ourselves, by conquest or cunning or other means not provided for in the law of love, a great empire covering a vast portion of the earth’s surface.”