the press of this country laid the facts before Secretary Daniels when the order was promptly revoked. But the native newspapers, with one exception, the Listin Diario, having no one to speak for them in the seats of the mighty, are reported to have "stayed dead." Captain Knapp's cabinet consists of naval officers and marine officers, and there is no congress, no free press, no effective force to hold him in check. Foreigners are gobbling up the best of the cane lands.

In Haiti we have forced a convention on a free people by giving them their choice between a treaty surrendering to the United States the collection and disbursement of their customs receipts, and the creation and control of a constabulary. Having signed the convention, we then imposed upon them a military occupation, having refrained from paying the interest on their foreign and domestic loans while using $95,000 a month of their income to pay the costs of our occupation, which the Haitian people detest, particularly our rigid martial law. It is only just to say that this policy was entered upon by our State Department with real intent to be of service, because it felt that the country was in chaos and anarchy, and that the foreign bondholders, through their governments, would soon insist that either the United States should make order in the republic or let some outsider do it. I am not here to impugn motives, but merely to record facts, and the fact is that the government and the people of Haiti, who always paid the interest on their foreign loans, are now on the point of bankruptcy and their government is on the verge of being broken down by us, while the Washington authorities delay the payment of interest on all loans and the refunding of the total indebtedness, which, despite years of revolution, is only $32,000,000. They take pride, and justly so, that our marine officers have created a splendid gendarmerie of sixteen hundred men, have built and repaired a number of roads, and given the peasantry a sense of security which has not been theirs for years. If there was chaos, that is at an end, and there is that much clear gain.

But granting, for the sake of argument, all that may be urged as to the necessity of our intervening in these two republics, what then? Are we sailing by any chart? What course have we laid out? Is there any definite governmental aim? If so, it has not been stated. Neither the Republican nor Democratic platforms of 1916, I repeat, made the slightest reference to either republic or our rela

tions to them. Is there any social or educational survey of the republics on foot? None. Is there any recognition of the necessity of differentiating between the Haitians, who are French in culture, and the San Dominigans, who are Spanish in culture? A proposal to send an American commission to Haiti privately financed was spurned a year ago by the State Department as likely to hurt the Haitian feelings if it should undertake a study of the underlying economic and social causes of the unrest of the past-those feelings, which, we are told, were in nowise disturbed when we forced the surrender treaty upon them! There is no definite national declaration as to how long we shall stay, how often we shall renew the treaties, or whether we shall ever let go. Neither President nor Congress has spoken on this point, nor as to whether we hitherto non-militaristic Americans should or should not govern these countries by military officials. If they are to be militarily governed, then by what branch of the service? Porto Rico and the Philippines are under the War Department; the other nations in our tutelage are under the navy. The Bureau of Insular Affairs is not yet trusted with the Virgin Islands; until the war permits a more leisurely arrangement, they are to be governed by an admiral on a makeshift basis.

serves.

All question of a serious taking of stock is deferred. We shall not know just how much of industrial bankruptcy and depression and human backwardness we have purchased in the Virgin Islands until peace returns. And then? Then it will surely be time to exalt the whole question of the government of our permanent and temporary wards of whom the bulk of our people are so ignorant, to a position in which it shall have the attention it needs and deBut how shall it be done? It is not merely a question of deciding whether the islands are to have military or civilian government; whether we shall not follow the example of England in Egypt in letting the natives carry on their own government under the oversight of a diplomatic agent-resident, in the manner of Cromer. It is not only a question of deciding whether Haiti and San Domingo are to be governed merely for the purpose of keeping order for a term of years and getting them out of debt, or even whether they are to be scientifically administered in order that their peoples shall really be trained in the art of self-government and be taught to walk, so that when we withdraw they shall not stumble and fall

again. Far beyond this, first and foremost of all, is the question: What is it we have in our minds and hearts for them? Are we to be guided wholly by philanthropy, by the desire to help these small nations to an independent existence, as we are praying for independence after the war for Greece, Belgium and Serbia, or is their proximity to us, the wealth of their remarkable economic resources and their trade relationship to us, to give to our spectacles another hue as we look upon them? Shall the country remember what Mr. Wilson has said: "It is a very perilous thing to determine a foreign policy in the terms of material interest"? Shall the nation say with him: "Morality and not expediency is the thing that must guide us (in our relations with other nations), and we must never condone iniquity"-inquity even in our own attitude and policy?

Shall the noble words of Wilson at Mobile apply only to conquest in war, or shall we make them a similar self-denying ordinance against that form of conquest which has given us practically complete control of Haiti and San Domingo, happily with but little bloodshed, but a control none the less as complete as if we had let General Pershing march to Mexico City and let him take over the whole government of Mexico. Many Americans have been killed in Mexico and much American property damaged; no such charge lay against Haitians or San Dominigans. Is the difference in our policy towards them wholly due to their difference in extent of territory? Is there to be further intervention of this sort to the south of us, dependent upon haphazard act or as the result of a well-thoughtout policy? Surely, we can all agree that the vital importance of these relationships, not only as to those directly affected, but in their very great effect upon our trade and political relations with Central and South America, dictates that the administration of these wards should be in the hands of a Cabinet officer, and each dependency, temporary or permanent, represented as are Porto Rico and the Philippines by delegates to Congress. Perhaps it may be well, even, to establish a House of Colonial Delegates, in order that their special problems may profit by mutual interchange of ideas and of experiences.

Surely, some means must be devised for bringing the needs and desires of these very different peoples now under our care before the public, so that we shall not repeat in their case our nation's lamentable record in the matter of our Indian wards; so that, for instance,

when an admiral-governor suppresses a book and all the native press because he does not like the contents thereof, it shall be possible to get the facts before Congress, the government and the people. If such a one says, as one does today, that no native newspaper shall have any more right to criticize the American occupation of the island he controls than the Belgians have the right to criticize their cruel and overbearing conquerors, there should be some way of letting this be known outside the circles of officialdom, which are so apt to dismiss a question like this, even when it affects a fundamental human liberty, one expressly guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, with a brusque: "It serves the beggars right."

In other words, the question before us is whether we are really going to set ourselves down to the task of governing well, according to the highest American tradition, these peoples who have no desire whatever to be governed by us and prefer to be governed poorly by themselves so long as they may have self-government and independence rather than be governed by outsiders whose culture and point of view in every fundamental thing are so alien. Shall we in the spirit of high humanity seek to establish with complete unselfishness, true democracy in these wonderful islands of Haiti and San Domingo, as against the autocracy of despotic or military control? Shall we not live up to the words of President Wilson in his war message, that "the world must be made safe for democracy”— safe, let us hope he meant, even from Americans? Certainly, there could be no better program for our conduct in Haiti and San Domingo than the President's assertion with which I began this paper. It is of the utmost importance for our own standing before the world that the several departments of the government whose duty it is to carry out the details of our foreign policy should not only conform to the high standards set by him, but should be still further committed to them by a detailed and definite promise registered in the eyes of all the world and before high Heaven itself. Any other course would surely give "aid and comfort" to the common enemy.

THE RIGHTS OF SMALL AMERICAN NATIONS

NICARAGUA AND COLOMBIA

BY HENRY R. MUSSEY, PH.D.,

Columbia University, New York.

In his remarkable book on Mid-Europe, Friedrich Naumann sees the world of the future divided among three or four great empires British, Russian, American and possibly Mid-European. By a law of inevitable social evolution, Naumann maintains, these great superstates attract to themselves more and more power, looking after their own interests within the world's system, becoming economically self-sufficient, and making the states outside helpless against their tariff policy, commercial intrigues, limitation of imports, metal monopolies, cotton trusts, against their colonial dominion and world-encircling policy.1 Small states which cannot carry through any tariff war, but need daily imports and exports, must in future be registered with one of the great world-firms, as soon as the superfirms themselves mutually separate off from one another even more than they had done before the war.2

Of course Naumann is thinking chiefly in terms of small European states, but is he or is he not describing what is actually happening in the western world as in the eastern? Is or is not the United States by steady process annexing, both economically and politically, her neighbors to the south of Mexico? Whether she is or not, is she, at each stage of her progress, taking scrupulous care to safeguard the rights of the small nations as interpreted by their spokesmen, and in this way avoiding any accumulation of grievances that may some day return to plague her? I shall confine my answer to the states of Nicaragua and Colombia.

Practically everyone admits some sort of right of a country's inhabitants to profit by its natural riches. All Americans do lip service, at least, to the right of self government. They agree that a stronger nation in dealing with a weaker should so far as possible safeguard these two rights. Our Caribbean neighbors have large natural riches, and they have not yet made a conspicuous success of self government. American capital seeking profit from Caribbean

1 P. 193.

? P. 195.