Part 8

Italy's demonstration of the extent to which this madness can carry otherwise sane statesmen is fresh in everybody's memory. Outside of Russia, the poor--meaning the working classes--are in no country of Europe as poor as in Italy. If we take the production per acre in all the cereals as a gauge of interior development, then no European country west of Russia, not excepting Spain, is in a more backward state. Wise statesmanship would have found here a field for cultivation sufficiently large to tax all its energies. The peaceful acquisitions of industry did not satisfy the ambition of the Government. Conquests in equatorial Africa were deemed more essential to the kingdom's material welfare, but lately freed from the deadening grasp of clericalism and absolutism, than the improvement of opportunities lavishly present at home. What she has cultivated at an enormous expense of blood and treasure has borne the ordinary harvest of failure and disaster. The entire import trade of Massowah, to which the whole world contributed, and which is largely a transit trade, amounts to about $5,000,000. The expenditure on account of her Red Sea possessions for the year 1895-'96 is given in the Statesman's Year Book as 123,738,064 lires ($24,000,000). The contribution to the maintenance of this her "white man's burden," from 1882 to 1895, was 303,905,926 lires. At present (1897-'98), after the sobering lesson received in 1896, the net expense is about $3,500,000 (17,000,000 lires).

The three powers--France, Italy, and Germany--point a lesson of unmistakable significance. The figures speak for themselves. No amount of expense can make the African and the Asiatic consume an appreciable amount of European merchandise. No amount of cultivation can make the tropics endurable to the northern man. Labor and exertion on his part under the rays of a deadly sun and a miasma-breeding soil are entirely out of the question. Those who would make the endeavor in the manner of the temperate zone would only succeed the sooner in reaching the end of white man's settlement in the tropics, disease and death.

Many point to the Dutch East India settlements as a successful commercial enterprise. But, taking the best construction given to the story from the trader's point of view, the present satisfactory conditions have been reached after a great deal of disappointment, loss, and bloodshed. A large revenue is acquired from Government sales of colonial produce; still, with all this added to the other revenues from land tax, excise, and other duties, the Government has a deficiency of over 10,000,000 florins a year in her East India possessions. The budget for 1898 shows an expense _état_ of 146,150,164 florins, which is met by a revenue from all sources of but 135,204,203 florins.

This is the richest part of the Malay world, and for centuries has been in the possession of Europe's most enlightened people. The results, if the _per-capita_ unit of imports and exports is taken as a criterion, are not different from those shown in the account of the Philippines, governed for centuries by Spain. The loss of their colonies is ascribed to the oppressive rule which the Spaniards exercised. The Netherlands, devoting all their efforts to the development of the resources of the islands, at least during the greater part of this century, do not show much better results. The imports _per capita_ of the Dutch possessions are $1.80, and the exports $2.63. The imports of the Philippines are $1.50 and the exports $2.63 _per capita_.

From this we may be permitted to deduce that the Malay Islands are not likely to prove a more thankful field for cultivation by our traders than to the extent indicated in the trade reports set forth above.

Under the conditions here delineated, it would be inviting all the risks and dangers connected with expansion and colonization, while nothing is to be gained in a commercial sense that can not be realized by the means now in our hands.

All the ends of trade can be attained without territorial expansion. The trade in the hands of peoples under English sovereignty is open to all commerce on equal terms. Not even the sovereign country, except in the recent concessions by Canada, receives a preference. The protection of the British flag is tendered gratis to the colonies and dependencies. The imports of these countries cover about one half of the trade of all the world, outside of Europe and the United States. Though they have but 4.67 per cent of the population, the Anglo-Saxon colonies do sixty-nine per cent of the trade of all the colonies and dependencies of the British Empire.

South and Central America absorb about one fourth--24.6 per cent of imports and 26.7 per cent of exports--of the world's trade here summarized. The colonies peopled by Anglo-Saxon population and the Latin-American states together, though but 7.3 per cent of the inhabitants, do an importing trade of 57.4 per cent of the trade of the world here reviewed. The countries trading under the protection of the British flag and the Latin-American states combined have about seventy-three per cent of that trade among them. All this trade, as well as by far the greatest part of the rest, is incontestably accessible to-day on an equal basis to all the world. The key to it lies in the best terms, the best value. The trader and not the admiral governs the field. Prince Heinrich will not succeed better than Admiral von Diederichs in convincing China of the advantages Germany can offer if Mr. Carnegie's rails are cheaper than Mr. Krupp's. A whole fleet of American battle ships will not convince the Asiatics that our cotton goods are as desirable as the English so long as the latter make goods suitable to their markets, and the Americans offer only products calculated to cover the home demands.

The golden rule is a more effective trade opener than the cannon's mouth. Fair and square dealing among nations does not entail expense, but brings in good returns. Our national policy, however, has been one studiously calculated to array the world against us. Like every policy in behalf of a selfish interest, it injures the foreign people against which it is directed far less than the nation which devises it.

The trade of Australasia, Argentina, and Uruguay, and the Cape is based chiefly on wool and hides. The imports of these countries, numbering but eleven million inhabitants, amount to $440,000,000, equaling in amount the trade of China, Japan, Persia, and India, with their seven hundred and fifty million inhabitants. Though but 1.2 per cent of the population of the world (outside of Europe and the United States), their imports are 27.8 per cent of the totals of the figures in the tables. In exports they do about $400,000,000, or 24.9 per cent of the total sum of exports here given. It would be worth cultivating friendly relations with them. They are inhabited by people of European stock, and come nearer to the standard of life of Americans than any of the other nations of the globe. Our latest effort to draw them closer to us was the Dingley tariff, with its duty of eleven cents a pound on greasy wool and of fifteen per cent on raw hides. The action can not be construed as a very friendly one. But neither is the effect as calculated by the wise heads who insisted on the provisions of the wool tariff, the woolen and worsted manufacturers of the East, and the wool raisers of the West. The wool and woolen trade of America has suffered many vicissitudes during the thirty-five years of high tariffs. It has gone through many periods of depression. But it is doubtful whether at any time more disastrous conditions existed than have marked the twelve months ending at this writing (March, 1899).

The situation can be appreciated from the fact that wool, imported prior to the passing of the Dingley tariff, is being reshipped to England, where it is bringing better prices than can be obtained here under the ægis of the protective duty of eleven cents a pound. Three and a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending January 31st.

We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections can be established, instead of following the _ignis fatuus_ of Asiatic expansion.

THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.

BY EDMUND NOBLE.

It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's knowledge of himself--of his body and the parts thereof, of his corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions gained from the more remote inorganic world.

Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate the external system to himself are those with which we are more or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or "feather" in many Melanesian languages.[A] In more modern forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the _head_ of a bridge, the _eye_ of a needle, the _mouth_ of a river, the _neck_ of an estuary, the _trunk_ and _arms_ of a tree, the _lungs_ of a bellows, the _bones_ of an umbrella, the _nose_ of a promontory, the _ears_ of a book, the _fingers_ of a clock, the _legs_ of a table, the _veins_ of marble, the _foot_ of a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing--when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies," "babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as _taube Nuss_ ("with nothing in the shell") and _taube Kohlen_ ("those which have burned out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the _cæcum vallum_ of Roman speech, in _ciego_, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no eyes," and in the _blinder Schuss_ of the Germans, whose more familiar _Augenblick_ everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as the _caput mortuum_ (_tête morte_) of chemistry, _eau vive_ (_Quellwasser_), "dead water" (turn of the tide), _todte Farbe_ and _lebhafte Farbe_, _vivus lapis_ (firestone), "quicksand" and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level," and _todtes Kapital_. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to stones and manufactured articles.

This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest illustrations in poetry,[B] where it may be held to represent less the elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for "two" certain syllables (_ny_ and _ceul_) which originally mean "ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (_Schock_) signifies sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ the word _mettens_, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the practice of designating thirty by the word _kahlis_, meaning "cord." The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word _chuncu_, "heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb _chaba_, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction." So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five," "two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.

A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger, the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot--the extended arms, as in the ancient _orgya_, and the extended legs, as in the modern yard--have all played a fundamental part in determining the standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the [Greek: gyê], the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in one day; the _stade_, the distance which a good runner could traverse without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.

The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel, for example, was so constructed--with the body of a bird, with cheeks, eyes, and projecting ears--as to make it seem to the navigators of the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has betaken itself to the sea.

Not less suggestive are the more general aspects of the process. Our ancestor called the earth's satellite the "moon," or "measurer," because it served him as a divider of time. The familiar grains of wheat and barley which he harvested became the units of his measures. So the names of his seasons were based on the fall of the leaves, the reappearance of particular stars, or the periodical inundations upon which he depended for his food. The most primitive method in chronology is that which enables man to orient himself in the world of time by associating particular lunations with vicissitudes of weather, with seasonal aspects of vegetation, and with the constantly changing sights and sounds of the animal world. In the calendar of the Crees,[C] for example, we find such designations as "duck-month," "frog-moon," "leaf-moon," "berries-ripe-month," "buffalo-rutting moon," "leaves-entirely-changed," "leaves-in-the-trees," "fish-catching-moon," "moon-that-strikes-the-earth cold," "coldest-moon," "ice-thawing-moon," "eagles-seen-moon." So in the calendars of Central America and Mexico,[D] the months are named variously after the arrival of birds, the blossoming of flowers, the blowing of winds, the return of mosquitoes, and the appearance of fishes. The Greeks constantly used the movements of birds to mark the seasons; the arrival of the swallow and kite were thus noted. Hesiod tells us how the cry of the crane signaled the departure of winter, while the setting of the Pleiades gave notice to the plowman when to begin his work. The Incas[E] called Venus "the hairy," on account of the brightness of her rays, just as the Peruvians named her the "eight-hour torch," or "the twilight lamp," from the time of her shining. One at least of the three portions into which the Greeks divided their night received its name--[Greek: peri lychnôn haphas]--from the social custom of lighting the lamps at dusk. For whole races the departure of the sun made night a time of danger, and man did his best to lessen the mystery of the heavens by filling their obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "The Way of Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[F]

Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction," "repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current," contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in _Trägheit_, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase "natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it describes. And when one observes how persistently such an anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical reaction, or with what _naïveté_ the term "law" is transferred from the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes, one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin.

It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity, traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the process that the characters thus projected into the environment must always--throughout the history of human ascent, and at every particular stage of it--be closely and definitely correlated with the degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source.

The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[G] But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his fellow-beings--through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death itself--our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due--learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he read the malignant will of his own angry passions.