United States -- Economic conditions -- 1918-1945; United States -- History
The workers have no more to gain from empire building than they have
from war making, but they pay the price of both. Empire building and war
making are Siamese twins. They are so intimately bound together that
they cannot live apart. The empire builder--engaged in conquering and
appropriating territory and in subjugating peoples--must have not only
the force necessary to set up the empire, but also the force requisite
to maintain it. Battleships and army corps are as essential to empires
as mortar is to a brick wall. They are the expression of the organized
might by which the empire is held together.
The plain people are the bricks which the imperial class uses to build
into a wall about the empire. They are the mortar also, for they man the
ships and fill up the gaps in the infantry ranks and the losses in the
machine gun corps. They are the body of the empire as the rulers are its
guiding spirit.
When ships are required to carry the surplus wealth of the ruling class
into foreign markets, the workers build them. When surplus is needed to
be utilized in taking advantage of some particularly attractive
investment opportunity the workers create it. They lay down the keels of
the fighting ships, and their sons aim and fire the guns. They are
drafted into the army in time of war and their bodies are fed to the
cannon which other workers in other countries, or perhaps in the same
country, have made for just such purposes. The workers are the warp and
woof of empire, yet they are not the gainers by it. Quite the contrary,
they are merely the means by which their masters extend their dominion
over other workers who have not yet been scientifically exploited.
The work of empire building falls to the lot of the workers. The profits
of empire building go to the exploiting class.
3. _The British Workers_
What advantage came to the workers of Rome from the Empire which their
hands shaped and which their blood cemented together? Their masters took
their farms, converted the small fields into great, slave-worked
estates, and drove the husbandmen into the alleys and tenements of the
city where they might eke out an existence as best they could. The
rank-and-file Roman derived the same advantage from the Roman Empire
that the rank-and-file Briton has derived from the British Empire.
Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred
years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great
Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her
financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her
manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on
the British flag.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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