IMMIGRATION IMPERIALISM
sentiment inevitably springs. Finally, all persons should
be excluded who are below a certain standard of
economic fitness to enter our industrial field as
competitors with American labor. There should be
proper proof of personal capacity to earn an American
living and enough money to insure a decent start under
American conditions. This would stop the influx of
cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives
rise to so much of bitterness in American industrial life.
(First Annual Message, Washington, December 3,
1901.) Mem. Ed. XVII, 110-111; Nat. Ed. XV, 95-96.
Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the
Atlantic States dislikes to see the Western miners and
cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux
hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on
the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually
in contact with the savages, who in the end shape their
own destinies. (1894.) Mem. Ed. XI, 274-275; Nat. Ed.
IMPERIALISM. Nations that expand and nations that
do not expand may both ultimately go down, but the
one leaves heirs and a glorious memory, and the other
leaves neither. The Roman expanded, and he has left a
memory which has profoundly influenced the history of
mankind, and he has further left as the heirs of his
body, and, above all, of his tongue and culture, the so-
called Latin peoples of Europe and America. Similarly
to-day it is the great expanding peoples which bequeath
to future ages the great memories and material results
of their achievements, and the nations which shall have
sprung from their loins, England standing as the
archetype and best exemplar of all such mighty nations.
But the peoples that do not expand leave, and can leave,
nothing behind them. (1900.) Mem. Ed. XV, 290-291;
Nat. Ed. XIII, 339.
____________. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules
of international morality which obtain between stable
and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the
fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the
standards of to-day. Most fortunately, the hard,
energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work
of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false
sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who
stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish
and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand
the race-importance of the work which is done by their
pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they
judge them by standards which would only be
applicable to quarrels in their own townships and
parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it
misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself
misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain
grudges to the Africander his conquest of
IX, 57.
____________. Russia has expanded in Asia, England
in Asia, Africa and Australia, and France and Germany
in Africa, all with the strides of giants during the years
that have just passed. In every instance the expansion
has taken place because the race was a great race. It was
a sign and proof of greatness in the expanding nation,
and moreover bear in mind that in each instance it was
of incalculable benefit to mankind. In Australia a great
sister commonwealth to our own has sprung up. In
India a peace like the Roman peace has been
established, and the country made immeasurably better.
So it is in Egypt, in Algiers and at the Cape, while
Siberia, before our very eyes, is being changed from the
seat of wandering tribes of ferocious nomads into a
great civilized country. When great nations fear to
expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their
greatness is coming to an end. Are we still in the prime
of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious
manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to
take our place with the weak and craven? A thousand
times no! A thousand times rather face any difficulty—
rather meet and overcome any danger—than turn the
generous and vigorous blood of our national life into
the narrow channels of ignominy and fear. (At Akron,
O., September 23, 1899.) Thomas W. Handford,
Theodore Roosevelt, The Pride of the Rough Riders.
(Chicago, 1899), pp. 190-191.
IMPERIALISM—JUSTIFICATION OF. It is
infinitely better for the whole world that Russia should
have taken Turkestan, that France should have taken
Algiers, and that England should have taken India. The
success of an Algerian or of a Sepoy revolt would be a
hideous calamity to all mankind, and those who abetted
it, directly or indirectly, would be traitors to
civilization. And so exactly the same reasoning applies
to our own dealings with the Philippines. (At Lincoln
Club Dinner, New York City, February 13, 1899.)
Mem. Ed. XVI, 476; Nat. Ed. XIV, 317·
IMPERIALISM—OPPONENTS OF. There are some
anti-expansionists whose opposition to expansion takes
the form of opposition to Ameri-
IMMIGRATION. See also AMERICAN PEOPLE;
CHINESE IMMIGRATION; GERMAN IMMIGRATION;
JAPANESE EXCLUSION.
IMPARTIALITY. See NEUTRALITY.
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