Expansion

“ Expansion gives the ruling oligarchy of the expanding nation, empire or civilization command of the strategic vantage points from which the principle of exploitation can be made continuously operative. ”

“ A state formed by colonial expansion presents difficulties to any one who tries to define its nature. It is like a family of plants all sprung from one stock; the stock has sent out offshoots, which have themselves struck root, but are still connected with the parent stock from which they sprang. ”

“ The study of expansion reveals to us the fact that expansion and contraction furnish the many elements of all human action, but that expansion is first, that expansion expresses joy, exhilaration, animation in life, and that contraction, aside from its co-ordination with expansion in causing control in intensity, expresses antagonism, hate, anger, pain. ”

“ Expansion seems to be regulated, not by any difficulties of resistance, but by the moderation which results from our own internal constitution. No one knows how rapidly that restraint may give way. Who can tell how far or how fast it ought to yield? Commerce has brought the ancient continents near to us, and created necessities for new positions—perhaps connections or colonies there—and with the trade and friendship of the elder nations, their conflicts and collisions are brought to our doors and to our hearts. ”

“ These vast and far-reaching changes were brought about by an expansion particularly in the fields of transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing. Steam, electricity, progress in invention, the growth of an immigrant population, and the opening of new lands to settlement, all served as contributing factors. ”

“ Any man in the more thickly settled regions who might be dissatisfied with his lot saw the frontier beckoning. Expansion, as in the twelfth century, made for a buoyant temper in the mind, but, unlike that of the twelfth century, this temper was too contemptuous of the past (because of the sixteenth century break with tradition and also because the expansion was without precedent) ; whereas the twelfth and thirteenth centuries felt that they were only partly reconquering the Roman order. ”

“ Empires and civilizations are established during periods of social expansion when the up-building and out-going urges are widely felt. The surge produces not a single center of growth and expansion but dozens or scores of competitors, each aiming to win and keep a position well in advance of its rivals. The resulting up-surge and free-for-all, which usually lasts for centuries, is a characteristic and recurring feature in the political life of every civilization. ”

“ During their periods of expansion civilizations are dynamic. Their history records growth at home, expansion abroad, exploitation, domestic and foreign under the pressure of effective motivating forces. The resulting dynamism leads to the contradictions, confrontations and conflicts which have studded the internal and external life story of every civilization.
Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the dynamic functioning of civilization is its growth in magnitude. ”

“ In every instance the expansion has been of benefit, not so much to the power nominally benefited, as to the whole world.{30} In every instance the result proved that the expanding power was doing a duty to civilization far greater and more important than could have been done by any stationary power. ”

“ But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. ”

“ In our natural, necessary, irrepressible expansion, we are come here into contact with the progress of another great people, the law of whose being has impressed upon it a principle of growth which has wrought mightily in the past, and in the present is visible by recurring manifestations. ”

“ Paralleling their domestic expansion, civilizations expand geographically up to the point of diminishing returns, determined by the growth of overhead costs. This process has taken the civilization, its personnel, its institutions and practices into territory not heretofore occupied, sometimes with the consent of the "foreigners", but more often in the teeth of their determined and long-continued opposition.
Expansion of a civilization is of necessity a movement from an urban center and beyond the urban center. ”

“ And all this time, we are in an epoch of expansion; [72] and the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one salvation of an epoch of expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. ”

“ It seems to have been, when properly regarded, a revulsion in the midst of a great expansion of industrial power, which expansion produced modifications of the industrial organization which could not well take place without some greater or lesser catastrophes. ”

“ The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. ”

“ There is another phenomenon that is working in the same direction, and which, even more than the competitive arming, is destined to reduce the policy of expansion to an ad absurdum, and thereby to cut off from the present method of production its last possibility of further evolution. ”

“ Relationship between nucleus and periphery are the normal outcome of the expansion of a nucleus into an empire. Each growing urban center reaches out for an extension of its territory; for the food and raw materials required by a growing population; for markets that can absorb the goods and services exported by the urban center to pay for its necessary imports of food and raw materials. ”

“ The great city expansion in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendicular. We shall have many knots, clustered about factories and other enterprises, and we shall learn how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather than merely to assemble them. Before this time comes, we shall have passed the present insistence on so-called commercial efficiency, as if it were the sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall [Pg 64] come to have control. All this will rest largely on the dividing of the land. ”

“ Thus, expansion will be great in a mountainous country, where the natural products, i.e., woods and pastures, need less labour, where we know from experience that women are more fertile than in the plains, and where a great expanse of slope affords only a small level tract that can be counted on for vegetation. ”

“ Besides the surprising development of our sales of manufactured goods in the most advanced industrial countries of Europe, which may be said to have introduced an entirely new element into Old World trade, we find other phases of commercial expansion which were quite as unexpected and are likely to profoundly affect our economic, and perhaps our political, future. ”

“ The fact that everything had to be built up anew from small beginnings on a virgin soil gave an opportunity to trace the rise of institutions from their infancy in a Puritan dwelling or in a town meeting till they spread and consolidated over a continent. In this short time the people have grown from little scattered settlements to a nation, have experienced an undreamed-of material expansion; have passed through a rapid succession of great political struggles, and have had an unrivaled evolution of agriculture, commerce, manufactures, inventions, education, and social life. ”

“ The age of "expansion," the age of European "empires" is near its end. No one who can read the signs of the times in Japan, in India, in China, can doubt it. It ended in America a hundred years ago; it is ending now in Asia; it will end last in Africa, and even in Africa the end draws near. ”

“ The first is derived from the analogy there is between expansion and reproduction; expansion cannot be explained in a satisfactory manner, without employing those penetrating powers, and those affinities or attractions we have already made use of to explain the formation of small organized beings, resembling the great ones which contain them. ”

“ Only the adventurous and the farseeing can be expected heartily to welcome the process of expansion, for a nation which expands is a nation which is entering upon a great career, and with greatness there must of necessity come perils which daunt all save the most stout-hearted. ”

“ The others will for a time keep on expanding—in fact, for the moment, the tendency278 will be to quicker expansion, for the vital force which is refused scope on the ground layer will strive to find vent in those above—until, at length, there is a decided overbalance and a sudden crumbling along all the faces of the pyramid. ”

“ Every completed civilization known to historians has passed through a sociological life cycle: origin, growth, expansion, maturity, violent premature dismemberment and death in the competitive survival struggle or gradual decline and eventual dissolution. ”

“ They were brought to it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult ”

“ I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. ”

“ The period following the Civil War naturally became one of national expansion, the faces of many were turned 201westward, and exploration of the national domain for its industrial possibilities took on fresh interest. ”

“ With such a prospect before us, who thinks that we should shrink from an enlargement of our national sphere because of the limitations that bound, or the dangers that threatened, before railroads, before ocean steamers, before telegraphs and ocean cables, before the enormous development of our manufactures, and the training of executive and organizing faculties in our people on a constantly increasing scale for generations? ”

“ Everywhere the population increased; old cities grew apace, and a multitude of new ones came into existence. Economic evolution progressed, advancing with the affranchisement of industry, the organization of guilds, the growth of trade, the opening of new markets, fairs, and freer avenues of commerce: thus more wealth was diffused among the many. ”

“ The rapidity of our growth, and the consequent increase of our strength, has more than realized the anticipations of this admirable political legacy. Thirty years have nearly elapsed since it was written, and in the interval our population, our wealth, our territorial extension, our power—physical and moral—have nearly trebled. ”

“ Taking a broader view—for we might go on with the material details of progress all about us ad infinitum, did patience and strength hold out—we look abroad over the land, and note the great elements of a progress peculiarly American, in the growth and distribution of population, in manufactures, agriculture, and commerce. Each and all have been incalculably aided by perpetual invention. ”

“ In early ages, when knowledge was but little advanced, and when the small stock that had been accumulated was confined nearly to a single spot, the first description of causes were the principal ones. -- Local situation, priority in discovery, or in establishment, gave to one nation a superiority over others, and occasioned the accumulation of wealth, and the acquisition of power and territory. ”

“ Let us expand, then, where we are healthy and strong. Is not there a magnificent field left for our ambition of aggrandizement? Yes, and it fills my soul with delight when I see events preparing themselves which will lead the whole continent north of us into our arms. ”

“ There was rivalry and conflict for the prize in every department. The rising generation, conscious of newly awakening powers, dared enterprise after enterprise and with each waxed greater. With increasing production, the power of assimilation also increased. Everything grand created in other centuries was drawn into the circle of their own nation as if just discovered. ”

“ They developed energies such as the world had seldom witnessed. With marvellous rapidity they levelled forests and builded cities; they tunnelled mountains, and cultivated valleys vast as empires; they made their mountain streams turn mills and factories and bear on their bosoms to the sea, and to all the world, the fruits of this industry and the products of the land. ”

“ As the country was growing by the expansive drive of which the frontier was the cutting edge, it was also growing up, both behind and on the frontier. The process of maturing is as significant as that of expanding. ”

“ Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. ”

“ The whole trend of affairs, however, both conscious and unconscious, was to make the world one vast hive of industry, instead of an infinite number of self-sufficient, separate hives; the village market had expanded into the provincial market, the provincial into the national, the national into the imperial, and the imperial into the world market. ”