Note 5 — Chapter XV

A guess at our possible losses through a non-aggressive policy in China is made by Mr. Thomas F. Millard in his "Our Eastern Question." "It is roughly estimated," he says, "that China's administrative, commercial, and economic development in the next twenty years will need $2,000,000,000 of foreign capital. Under a genuine application of the Hay Doctrine, America would have approximately one-fourth of this financing.... The returns from this investment would be partly interest and partly trade. Five per cent. interest on $500,000,000 is $25,000,000 income annually." In other words for the privilege of gaining twenty years from now $25,000,000 a year from an investment which if made at home or in the Argentine or in Russia would bring us in little less, Mr. Millard would have us put Japan in her place and if necessary join with England and perhaps France to fight both Japan and Russia. Even if we add the trade profits to this interest on investment, the total result is pitiably small. At our present rate of increase in wealth we may add about one hundred and fifty billions of dollars in the next twenty years. Whether or not one-half billion is invested in China is, nationally speaking, superlatively unimportant. If we intervene in China let us not do it for a few million dollars annually. (See Millard, op. cit., p. 383.)