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Show 8 Germany and Monroe Doctrine c 1 : : . I Thoughts Provoked by Recent Naval Incident in Monroe 3 I Doctrine WatersLarge German Population in South I America Glance Into the Future. 1 1' I (Boston Republic.) I Germany's sinking, in Monroe doc- ' I trine waters, of a Haytien insurgent Fhip which had taken ammunition from a German merchantman bound for ! ; JJayti, has made Europe dance with : curiosity and expectation. During the uth African war British battleships t 1 Ji'-ld up German merchantmen suspect- r fil of carrying contraband of war. and Germany made no protest. German Audacity, therefore, appears to have I the keenest possible edge, and the ij r""Prs look on with bulging eyes to) I see whether this is the prologue of the I j great German-American tragedy which 1 ; they all expect sooner or later. j s ; President Roosevelt has not at this I writing expressed an opinion, but the ! correspondents telegraphed that they ' believed the administration did not care how much the powers disciplined j pnuth and Central American governments govern-ments or insurgents so long as there ! I was no seizure of territory. I In any event, it adds one more eon- I J diment to the feast of war talk with j g which, the London press has been j I stuffing itself, and it behooves Amer- j I jeans to know exactly what is the fire ' which snds up so much smoke. ! I The German empire today is the j ty P'eat modern triumph of mind over I rrattr. The United States has become I industrially mighty in the midst of a I territory inexhaustible in natural resources. re-sources. Germany has become industrially indus-trially mighty in spite of the great liiresi wnicn makes one-fifth of her Foil sterile, and of the poverty of soil in the other four-fifths which makes it necessary to import fertilizers from the ends of the earth. Germany has fcafl to give up agriculture to a very great extent and buy food abroad. Beginning with these prodigious natural nat-ural disadvantages the nation by sheer force of scientific methods applied to industrial development has left England Eng-land hopelessly behind. outstripped France except in the daintiest excellence excel-lence of her art works, and comes readily down the track in pursuit of r" hir only remaining leader, the United States. Germany has wares to vend. Fhe must find markets. Germany can-tiot can-tiot raise her own food. She must buy it on good terms. Phe scans the globe end finds one vacant continent where rFho might plant her colonies South .America. Americans, the while, are worrying fver the future of their own markets. Except that we can feed ourselves, our rrohlem is almost precisely Germany's. "'ur enormous industrial development demands the winning of new markets. "iVhat are the facts about Germany trA South America? Does the average American citizen realize that there are 4'V. nno Germans in Brazil alone? Does he know that in the province of Rio Grande there are 250,000, or 30 per nt of the population and that in F'l-veral cities the German population is between 50 and SO per cent of the whole? Chile has a large. German pop-" Nation also. German business houses fnd banks are numerous and thriving, f f""'-rman steamship lines carry things j "made in Germany" and return with things eaten in Germany. Think of it; a continent, one of the richest in the world, marvellously I accessible by means of its great rivers l"vN navigable, the Amazon 6.000 miles. La Plata 4.000. Oriccno 1,000, Magdalena ;'V: inhabited by not more than rf'.wiri.criQ people, widely scattered over ::h f-;..yifi.ooo square miles: soil and mineral resources scarcely touched. It is El Dorado of the Incas. What s-a. r.f.fr- cnu(i be too great for Ger-. Ger-. rr.any to gain a fothold there? ,,-v in Germany every citizen must P"rve in the regular army two years, in th- reserves seven years, and in the landwehr ten. This, mind you, in a population of 50,000,000 as against our 80.000,000, and Germany's rate of in- i crease, from various causes, jumping notch over notch. Under the present law the peace standing of the German army is to have been increased, by 1504, to 502,506 men, with about 100 000 more in officers and surgeons. The elaborate system of army instruction and practical manouvers gives this vast establishment, aside from its size, a quality very different from that of I i the decadent Spaniards against whom our regulars and volunteers moved so overwhelmingly in 1S98. Is our army of 77,000 men, with a state milita which drills Monday nights and has an annual an-nual week in camp, adequate protection against such a standing menace? Under the law of 1S99 the German navy, by 1916. is to have appropriations for ship building which total $365,000,-000. $365,000,-000. The United States has only appropriated appro-priated $161,000,000 for war ships in all the time since 18S3, when our new navy was born. We now have afloat, or building, eighteen battleships, thirty-five'eruisers and eighteen moni- tors. The German provision will bring its total up to thirty-eight battleships and seventy-two cruisers. At our present pres-ent rate of building we shall have in a few years an interminable coast line w hich our navy, with its duties toward the colonies and to the merchant marine, ma-rine, and its responsibilities of offens-ive, offens-ive, action, could not protect against Germany. Some definite things are obvious national necessities. One is to increase by all safe methods the efficiency of I the state militia as a great national reserve. re-serve. Another is unwearying gener-! gener-! osity in the appropriations for new battleships. The country should at least be ready to fight. Not a shade less important, however, is the seemingly little understood national na-tional obligation to push our commercial com-mercial relations with South America to the point where trade and the Monroe Mon-roe doctrine may go hand in hand. The question of quieting permanently the disturbed republics is important and pressing, and we believe the national na-tional instinct will be tor an American protectorate of some sort in that matter mat-ter as well as in the traditional warding ward-ing off of foreign aggression. Diplomacy Diplo-macy may best t2ke care of that. Meanwhile something must be done to build up pan-American trade. Senator Hanna in his Buffalo speech made a strong argument for re-establishing our merchant marine, but it was apparent ap-parent he was still fondly nursing his idea of ship subsidies. The several lines of fruit steamers already doing good service with island and southern ports seem to exist prosperously without with-out subsidies. What is wanted is freer trade; reciprocity arrangements. The Roosevelt administration has Deen slipping down off the high ground I taken in this matter by President Mc-I Mc-I Kinley in his last speech. But it is ' doubtful if the less persuasive and ! diplomatic Roosevelt would be able, j even if he wished, to carry reciprocity treaties through a trust-ridden Republican Repub-lican senate. His fiasco in the case of Cuba is sfill familiar history. New England, where merchantmen once sped upon evermain, and may once more if wisdom rule, could do much worse than send her eighty-two votes into the Democratic national convention solidly pledged to Richard Olney, the secretary who is credited with having written the Venezuela ' message, as full of Monroe doctrine backbone as any of the present president's presi-dent's reffirmations, and who into the bargain is friendly to free trade, and holds membership, in a party which, if it controlled congress, would not block his designs under subsidy of the trusts. |