Page:Imperialism, A Study.djvu/11

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expansion as a justification for its actual or intended imperial aggression. In each case there is a growth of population needing more land for its employment and maintenance. In order to be economically effective that increase of land must be under the national flag. For though in the pre-war era freedom of emigration into the United States, Canada and other foreign countries prevailed, such outlets are now closed, It is held to be not only politically humiliating but economically unsafe that a nation should be dependent for its foods and raw materials upon the arbitrary changeful policies of foreign countries. For though it is evident that these foreign countries are not merely willing but eager to sell abroad their abounding supplies of these necessaries of life and industry, the countries needing them can only obtain supplies by selling abroad the surpluses of their own products, and these are now kept out or closely rationed by most foreign governments. Why? Because under the urge of nationalist sentiment, supported by appeals to self-sufficiency for purposes of defence, most nations conserve their own markets for their own producers, or for producers in their colonies or allied countries. For in almost all branches of production, agricultural, mining, manufacturing, the technical advances have been so great that each country is afraid of being flooded by foreign goods in its own markets and of being excluded from foreign markets for the sale of its own export goods. It is idle to urge that such fears and the policies of restriction and aggression which they stimulate are unreasonable, and that the removal of all barriers to international trade and migration would at once assuage hostilities and restore prosperity. Those who hold this view either assume and assert that the political sentiments of nationalism are the real sources of the economic policy they hold to be irrational, or else that certain monetary disturbances are responsible for the unemployment, closing