LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

heard this view for the first time was “struck all of a heap.” It was
unbelievable heresy.
What, not progress, not everything moving upward (not to say onwards)
toward bigger and brighter bonanzas? Mr. Adams in 1907, or 1908, or
1900 would have been one of the few Americans capable of locatin’ the
Tory outlook, Anschauung, disposition, in relation to something
concrete, to something real in the then status of England. I have said
before that his perceptions pretty well covered the world as it remained
during his life time. In 1903 he thought that England, France, Germany,
Belgium, Austria, the core of Europe were “apparently doomed not only
to buy their raw materials abroad but to pay the cost of transport.” That
view is interesting today. It may shed a bit of light on lease and lend
sport. He cast his eye fairly wide over the world. He found Siberia “a
narrow belt of arable land bounded by ice on the north, and by
mountains and deserts on the south.” Seemed to him a poor bet as
against the American continent, plus [the] fact the Rhoosians were still a
bit unhandy with new fangled machinery.
Those are a few items, say [a] few high lights of the world setup as seen
by an American expansionist in 1903. And I ’spose the pale blue Tory
eye that greeted me in Kensington five years later was lookin’ backward.
Backward toward Her own (that is’ England’s own) agriculture. Down
till 1845 it nearly sufficed for her wants. ENGLAND. Ole Viktoria’s
England. Advantage over the olde Roman empire. Instead of bein’
drained of her bullion England sold cotton to India, instead of havin’ to
buy grain from Sicily and from Egypt, and so on.… No such favorable
conditions had perhaps ever existed. An equilibrium so stable, had not
some fellow gone and invented the steam locomotive. “Given effective
land transportation,” wrote Mr. Adams, “the North American continent
seems devised by nature to be the converging point of the cheapest
routes between Asia and Europe.”