5

MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
With Six Hundred Thousand
? ?
TO BE A WORLD POWER
off his food and leave him to starve.
Because President Wilson and the rest
of the American delegation are the
greatest single force in the Paris conference; Because they have proposed and sixteen other powers have accepted, a. plan for a League of Nations; Because for the last six months the President of the United States has been beset by ,the diplomats of twenty nations, large and small to decide what they shall do.
Want U. S. as Guardian
This particular form of world power is now diminished because the main treaty with Germany has been signed, the President is home, and the. troops are rapidly returning. However, various, small peoples have filed an application to have the United States act as “mandatory” in charge of t em while they are fixing themselves to become nations.^ The Armenians, the Albanians, perhaps the Syrians, would like to have the government of the United States send out commissioners and small forces of troops to keep order, and show them how to be a free republic.	’
Uncle Sam has a kind heart and a long arm, hut it is a new idea that the United States should undertake to be schoolmaster for stripling nations in eastern Europe and western Asia. These mandatories require that we should render an account to a League of Nations. It is a high compliment to this country that so many peoples should like to go to our school. They all feel that the United States wants no territory in other parts of the world, and can be relied upon not to turn a temporary occupation into an annexation.
Responsibilities are Ours.
The pending League of Nations is based upon the idea that the United States not only wants to be but will be a World Power, as one of the partners in a World League, which shall protect small and weak nations, prevent great nations from breaking into each other’s territory, and provide a substitute for war by land and sea. If the Senate ratifies the treaty of which the League of Nations is a part, then we are bound in any event to be a World Power, and one of the biggest. We promise to be interested in the peace and good government and success of Poland and Jugoslavia, and a dozen other new little nations. We must join in such threats or shows of force as may be necessary to prevent Germany or any other evilly-disposed power from bringing on a great war. We are pledged to take part in Councils and Assemblies made up of representatives of all the world.
Could we avoid these new responsibilities by staying at home, going without an army, taking care of American affairs, and letting the rest of the world go its own pace? Many of us would be glad to live as a lonesome, peaceful, American power. Unfortunately, League of Nations or no League, the United States is in the world, and when things happen anywhere that threaten our peace and safety, we must take notice, whether they arrive on the western hemisphere or the eastern. Two years ago the United States went into the war as a World Power, because it was a World Power; because a European war which threatened to wipe out free government over there was anti-American; because we wanted to be a World Power.
A youth does not become a grown man because he wants to be, any more than he becomes an angel by not wanting to be. When he grows up, goes into business, mixes with all sorts of people, accumulates property, becomes a leader, he has to be a power in his community. Just so the United States of America has now come to a point, whether we like it or not, where it cannot keep out of the trade and intercourse and great wars which come upon the rest of the world.
Most Americans at the bottom of their hearts seem to prefer that their country shall count in the big affairs of the world. We may shrink from actual written agreements to join with other nations in putting out the fires of revolution that threaten mankind; but we cannot hold our own dependencies, or keep up the Monroe Doctrine, or take care of our foreign trade, or deal with our immigrants, without being a World Power. The only way to keep our strength and wealth from affecting the rest of the world would be to shut ourselves up by a Chinese wall, to bar out foreigners, to cut off our trade, to pull up the submarine cables, to blow up the wireless, to abolish the foreign post office—and even then real World Powers might prowl around outside, and by and by send over a fleet and army to find out what kind of a nation it was which, with a hundred and ten million people, did not “want to be a World Power.”
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Harvard University------Mooseheart Governor ■
to make us really an American Empire, with one great, strong, central nation,—and all the territories and dependencies taking their government from that.
A World Power Now
Most of these areas are outlyers ״of—the-North■*-American continent, and very near the United States. Why can we not be just a Western-world Power without being an All-world Power? The trouble about that proposition is that we have stuck our national fingers into various international pies much farther away. There is a mysterious something which we call the Monroe Doctrine, under which we claim the right to protect and look after all the remaining sixteen independent Latin-American powers, without aid or interference from Europe.
Why not? Isn’t that a simple American job?
It might be, if none of those nations had trade relations with other parts of the world, and if they all loved us and wanted to have us make them be good. Still we had the Monroe doctrine, for three quarters of a century, settled Central American and South American questions without European aid, and did not consider ourselves a world power.
Not so in Asia, where by the Spanish war of 1898 we became one of the World Powers, through the annexation of the Asiatic Philippine Islands. While we control eight million Asiatic subjects, we have to be a World Power and with the World Powers stand. Of course we have promised to give the Filipinos independence; but that is likely to be the same kind of independence that the Cubans enjoy—independence with a string tied to it. Wei shall doubtless require the Filipinos to agree not to enter into relations with any other nations against the interests and wishes of the United States. None of us seems ready to cut the cable and let the Philippine Islands float clear away: there is too much danger that Japan or somebody else will take them in tow.
Even leaving out the Philippine question we cannot help being something of a World Power in the Pacific and eastern Asia, which is only a few hundred miles from our western Alaskan islands. The American people do not look kindly on the idea that Japan is to have a free hand in eastern Asia. We are too much interested in the independence of China, the most populous nation on earth, a people capable of immense trade; we must insist that all other countries shall respect the “open door,” which would prevent Japan or any other power from getting a monopoly.
A true World Power, however, must be interested in the world outside the two Americas and the Pacific; Central Asia, Western Asia, Australasia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Western Europe. _ Just at the present moment, the United States is the most important World Power in all the world, because a few months ago we put a great army into Europe which came at the right time to turn the scales against Germany. Because our cruisers and destroyers joined in fighting the submarines, as the farmer fights the rats which are trying to carry
3ltt iHtmumaut
With great sorrow Mooseheart reports the death of Brother Thomas E. Peaks, Vocational Instructor in Sheet Metal Work, and Jesse Lambert Collins, a Mooseheart lad, age fourteen, from Durbin (W. Va.) Lodge No. 1465. They were severely burned by an unaccountable explosion of a gasoline torch, and after suffering four days Lambert succumbed on Monday afternoon, August 4th, and in the evening Brother Peaks followed his young charge into the light and love of Eternity. Mooseheart mourns greatly for these two and sends forth its sympathy to their friends and relatives with a prayer that the Heavenly Father may comfort and sustain them in their great sorrow.
Conversations
“WE WANT
“I want to be an angel
And with the angels stand;
A crown upon my forehead A harp within my hand.”
That is a good old Sunday school hymn, though most of those who sang it in youth have not yet reached the celestial delight of really being an angel, either on earth, or elsewhere. For, as the negro melody puts it, “Ev’y body talks ’bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there!”
Just now the people of the United States are interested less in being angels than in being somebody in the affairs of the world. We want to be a World Power and with the World Pow-insist that all the nations of the earth shall realize that we are the most powerful nation anywhere to be found, raising the most wheat, the most cotton, the most corn, the most coal, the most oil and the most onions; making the most iron and the most autemobiles; running the most miles of railroad with the most numerous locomotives; having the most money in the bank, the largest holdings of' good bonds, the richest cities—that in general we are the biggest, grandest and strongest land in the world—a power among powers.
All this may be true without our being a World Power, though it is not easy to talk so much about being Dig without feeling “biggity”. We know the kind of strong man who is always feeling of his muscle and bragging of his wind and threatening to punch the heads of those who disagree with him; who likes trouble and makes plenty of it for other people. We also know the big, slow, ■powerful, broad shouldered man who never _ disturbs other people, and can hardly be pushed into a row; but who hits with tremendous strength whenever anybody tries to put something over on him.
That is what Uncle Sam is to most people. We like to think of ourselves as good-tempered, easygoing folks, who did our best for three years to keep out of war, and went in with great reluctance; but fought with all our might when we felt that the time for fighting had come. The good-natured blacksmith and the ill-natured bruiser are both men of power in the little worlds in which they live. So the United States is one of the big factors in the makeup of the great world, whether peaceful or inclined to war.
That leads to the .first point in this discussion. Without all this boasting, it is a simple fact that the United States has more people brought up on the civilization of the western part of the world, than any other nation that is really in action at the present moment. We have a right also to say that the United States owns the richest collection of natural resources that are now drawn upon anywhere in the world; that we are running the best system of transportation; and that in times of need we can suddenly develop an army and put it in the ,field, numbered by the millions. If the United States wanted to be a bully, it has more material for bullying than any other one nation on earth.
No people, no race, no combination of nations wants to invade or fight the United States. The 1nearest approach to an enemy nation was Germany, which expected to attend to us when through smashing Great Britain, France and Italy. Otherwise the United States can, at least for the present, take care of itself. If we stay within our own boundaries, attend to our own business, feed and clothe our own people, why can we not be a World Power right here at home?
Here is the rub! We people of the United States do not stay at home, on the Continent of North America. Ever since 1898 we have looked longingly across our line fences, and have made ourselves a big power in a broad part of the world. How did we come by the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippine Islands ? How did we get into Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands and the Panama Canal strip ? How did we come to lay down the law and direct the policy of Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Nicaragua and the Republic of Panama?
We have acquired these three areas of territory, and these five dependencies in and around the Caribbean Sea, bcause we think we are entitled to be the ruling power there. All these are really colonies; though less in area than those of the European colonizing nations in other parts of the world, they are large enough and numerous enough
ers stand. We