Scribner’s Magazine
Political Problems of Europe
As They Interest Americans
By Frank A. Vanderlip
First Paper
UR interest in European affairs has been undergoing marked change in the last generation—even in the last half dozen years. We do not need to look back far to remember the time when we had little concern in world politics. Questions of European public policy, the tendencies of political currents, and the objects of national ambitions, were without practical interest to the average American. Even European war meant in our minds only that we were to sell more wheat and provisions, and we looked with greater interest at market quotations than we did at the questions which might involve nations in conflict. We were not only outside the range of the game of European diplomacy, but we lacked reason for having a keen practical interest in European social and industrial conditions.
We were concerned with Europe’s general prosperity, for Europe bought our produce; but the training, efficiency, and organization of European labor, the effect upon industrial progress of current legislation and of sociological tendencies, all had more of an academic than a practical interest for us. Important as was our foreign trade, four-fifths of our exports were the direct products of the farms, ranches, and forests. Our fields could fear no rivalry, and our workshops had not begun to challenge competition.
With the military and industrial successes of the last half dozen years, however, have come many and far-reaching changes. Not only is our present interest in world politics, in its relation both to our own political system and to our national ambitions, a matter of recent growth, but we have another quite immediate interest in the political conditions and development of other nations—an interest that leads us to measure the effect of national conditions and development on the efficiency of industrial and commercial competitors.
Now that we have taken our place in the first rank as a manufacturing nation and can see an inevitable destiny leading us toward world industrial competition, all the questions affecting the relative efficiency of the other great industrial countries in competition with us in the world markets become of practical importance to every American. The farm boy, the shop apprentice, the clerk, the worker in every field of American life, must henceforth have a more and more intimate personal relation to European conditions, problems, and tendencies. That is true because the conditions that are affecting our great industrial competitors, the problems with which they are concerned, the difficulties which they are encountering, the successes which give them fresh courage, will all have an increasing influence upon the net results of the day’s work of the average American.
For these reasons I believe that we are ready to give a more intelligent study to European conditions, and that it will be practically worth our while to gain a clearerCopyright, 1904, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. All rights reserved.
