Manawatu Herald SATURDAY. APRIL 9, 1921. THE SELF-CENTRED AMERICAN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2261, 9 April 1921, Page 2

Manawatu Herald SATURDAY. APRIL 9, 1921. THE SELF-CENTRED AMERICAN.

JX discussing llu* relations of the United Stales with foreign countries, the New York Outlook deals rather harshly with the ignorance of the average American regarding the outside world. It says: —“Most Americans have a vague idea that the United States is self-contained, and i< not Concerned, and perhaps ought not to he concerned, with what goes on in the rest ol the world. There arc three principal causes for this state of mind. First, Washington's widely quoted, bui widely misunderstood, dictum that we ought hot to have entangling alliances: second, our geographical situation, which in the early days of the Republic did separate us from Europe and Asia almost as much as (hough we were living in another plaiiel; and, third, the extreme development of the protective system after the Civil War, which taught large numbers of our people to think that the more commodities we can keep out of the country from foreign parts the richer we shall become, The World War has changed all this. We found that we had to make an alliance for self-protection with France, England. Italy and Belgium, We found find modern science, with its wireless telegraph and submarine cables, had so dried up the,, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that the failure of a silk house in Japan or a great bank in London produces instantaneously a disastrous effect on our own finance and industry. And we found that there is simply barter; that if we do not take goods from Japan and England we cannot sell the Japanese and English our cotton and wheat; that as a result our cotton and wheat-producing States are now suffering from a disastrous industrial depression,"