Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  I am proud of New York and awed by it. I am glad we built it-and I hope we never build another one. Like the stegosaurus it has grown too huge for its functions; like the stegosaurus it is bound to become extinct. It is the biggest and juiciest H-bomb target on the globe . . . too big to decentralize, too big to evacuate, too big to escape being hit.

  When we arrived in New York everybody seemed glued to television receivers, listening to hours of silly wrangling as to whether a certain Senator had or had not been rude to a certain general, and whether a certain private had or had not received more weekend passes than privates usually get. The interest in these rather trivial events was amazing. I don't think it has been equaled in any presidential campaign, even the 1940 election. The tragic events in Indo-China were then coming rapidly to their disastrous close-but nobody in New York seemed to be paying any attention; they were more interested in learning why a V.I.P. had let his picture be taken with a private.

  We were out of the country when the McCarthy madness swept over the land; consequently we arrived home as detached observers, not as partisans of either side. I tried to maintain that Man-from-Mars attitude but found it difficult; people were almost violently on one side or the other. What color rose do you wear, man?-red or white?-for you are either for us or against us.

  I still cannot manage to work up a fever; I seem to have been away during the infectious stage of the epidemic. Was it anything like the time the gunmen shot up the U.S. Congress? Oh no, nothing like that; this affair was conducted entirely with words. Had anyone been deprived of life, liberty, or property contrary to the Bill of Rights? No, but- Had anyone been hurt? Well, not physically. Financially perhaps? Well, yes and no, some persons had lost jobs after refusing to answer politically embarrassing questions.

  But, my informants insisted, I simply did not understand the real danger, the real importance, how every single one of us was vitally endangered by the things that had happened in these committee rooms.

  Well, I still don't see the overpowering importance. The McCarthy fit strikes me as the most astounding example of senseless hysteria since the Mississippi Bubble. Let me make it clear that I am neither supporter nor constituent of the Senator from Wisconsin; I just don't think anything that he has done is important, one way or the other. As a "fighter against communism" his efforts seem to have been rather futile; as a modern Torquemada the effect on his victims seems to have been public embarrassment only. In many of the cases, though not all, the embarrassment seems to derive from unwillingness to answer questions that vitally concern loyalty to the United States.

  If anyone cares to assert that the central character in all this is a big, hairy, horse's rear end, I will not argue the point. But I will point out that we have had some choice examples of the genus oaf in the United States Senate at other times; somehow, the Republic weathered the strain.

  But two things struck me very forcibly about the matter, coming as I did direct from months abroad. First, it has been asserted repeatedly by several prominent journals that the "real" danger of the McCarthy fit lay in the friends it lost us abroad and the prestige it cost us.

  This is nonsense almost complete. No one abroad was hurt-among our friends. It is true that the dust-up received much attention abroad and was used to make propaganda against us. But it was simply seized on as a chance to kick the Fat Boy by our enemies, who will do so on any excuse or without any excuse (as in germ warfare). Slandering Uncle Sam has gone on for years; the McCarthy row did not start it. For another reason which I will go into presently we should ordinarily pay no attention to what the press of any other nation says about us, but make our own decisions quite irrespective of what the world will think.

  We may have good reasons of our own to curb this Senator's activities, but to do so because our enemies or our putative friends dislike what is being done inside the United States would be to decide our national policies on an emasculating "Nervous Nelly" basis. To our dreadful cost in blood and treasure we have for years been making crucial decisions on just this unsound basis, worrying about what other people might think of us instead of worrying about what is right and what is wrong. If we find it proper for reasons of justice to clip the wings of the ubiquitous gentleman from Wisconsin, then by all means let us do so-but let us not act from fear of what the neighbors may think!

  For, I assure you, they don't give a tinker's dam what we think about their actions. American criticism of events in other countries-most particularly of anything as intimately domestic as the McCarthy row-is always rejected with indignation. Always . . . if you can think of a single exception, please write and tell me.

  Yet those selfsame citizens of second-rate powers, nations that have nothing standing between them and inundation by the communist flood but the strength of the United States, are almost unanimously ready to criticize Uncle Sugar on any score, ready to tell him what to do and how to do it, expecting him to foot the bill and most ready to vilify him if he fails to do just exactly what they advise. The most distressing truth that we learned in traveling around the world was how painfully few friends America has. We traveled entirely in territory and in ships of our allies in World War II, but only in Uruguay did we find a general feeling of friendliness toward the United States. Nowhere else!-not even in Australia.

  Once or twice we heard kindly remarks about the United States when people learned that we were from the States, but dozens and endless times it was simply an opportunity to read us a lecture on the "sins" of our country. To be sure, the McCarthy uproar was often used as a weapon to lambaste Uncle Sam, but any excuse was sufficient and it was usually something else. Baiting Uncle Sam is a favorite sport among our supposed friends.

  For this reason I assert that it does not matter what others think of the McCarthy mess. It should not be a factor in our thinking about the matter.

  The second thing that struck me forcibly about the McCarthy issue (on viewing it immediately after some months abroad) was how remarkably little McCarthy had been able to do even to those "victims" he had attacked most savagely and with least attention to fair play. No one seems to have noticed that our complicated system of safeguards to protect the innocent has stood up under this test and worked amazingly well. No one has been jailed other than after trial and due process-McCarthy himself has jailed no one; he has not the power. In fact no damage to an individual has been alleged other than damage to reputation and even that usually followed refusal to answer questions. I am not trying to "try" the McCarthy case, but I want to point out that it is not an example of breakdown of civil liberties but, on the contrary, a most outstanding triumph of civil liberties, one that probably could not happen anywhere else in the world!

  In the communist half of the world a man in McCarthy's shoes would really have power. He would be a "people's judge" and his victims would never live to complain. Their friends would not dare speak. In most of Latin America those politically out of favor hide out, or seek refuge in embassies, to avoid rotting incommunicado in jail. Even the British countries have no record of gentleness toward dissidents as gentle as that termed "McCarthyism"-oh, I admit that England has a very soft attitude toward communist treason at present but look at the whole record: Gandhi in jail repeatedly for passive resistance, the Black-and-Tans in Ireland, the present law in the Malay States making mere ownership of a gun a capital offense, the speed and harshness with which British courts act. I am not excusing any wrongful act that McCarthy may have committed; I do assert that we have failed to notice publicly the proudest aspect of the whole sorry business-that our safeguards for the individual stood up under pressure.

  The third thing that I noticed about the matter, confronting it cold on my return, was the amazing amount of stew for such a skimpy little oyster. The true importance of the whole thing has been vastly overrated.

  During our trip we were in the British Commonwealth about half way around the world. We had time to think about some facts well known but which we had not considered until
we had our noses rubbed in them, i.e., the potentiality of the British Commonwealth for balanced economic self-containment. We, like most Americans, had sent food parcels to Britain during the years of drastic rationing following the War. Now I am beginning to wonder why it was necessary? South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand all have large surpluses of food; all of them need manufactured goods. England needed food badly and was only too anxious to barter manufactured goods in exchange. I do not regret a one of those food packages; they were badly needed by hungry people-but what went wrong? What happened? It looks like a set-up designed by a wise Providence for a balanced economy with plenty to eat and plenty of goods for all. But it did not work out that way and even now it creaks badly. Why, with over 120,000,000 sheep in Australia, should it be so hard for a man in London to enjoy a mutton chop? England manufactures Kleenex and sells it to New Zealand; why should a box that costs seventeen cents in America cost five shillings in Auckland? (Seventy cents by direct conversion, more nearly a dollar and a half in view of the over-all price scale.) It can't be just a transportation differential, as eleven thousand miles by water is not as expensive as hauling goods across the North American continent by railroad.

  The old, tired excuse of "We can't get the dollars" does not apply here; this is all pound area. Nor was it that we were dunning England for the repayment of war loans, quite the contrary; we were handing over billions of dollars as a free gift.

  I have no degree in economics, nor do I have access to the statistics used by ministers of finance of the various Commonwealth countries to determine their policies. No doubt there are excellent reasons-but I suspect that the "excellent reasons" are of the same quality as those that have kept the little continent of Europe balkanized and pulling against itself. The longer I worried about this matter and tried to find out why the Commonwealth was in such sorry shape compared with what it seemed to be capable of achieving the more I kept finding the same facts-balkanization. The Commonwealth is not an integrated economic unit all operating under the same basic laws, as the United States is. On the contrary, every part of it is dragging its feet and trying to be one up on all the rest-precisely in the same fashion that our individual states have often attempted to do, only to be slapped down by our Supreme Court. But the Commonwealth has no supreme court, no overriding body of law; the once-great Free Trade area of the British Empire is now bogged down in local tariffs, taxes, import and export licenses, restrictions, and embargos, each intended to rig some advantage against the others and each player engaged in the same knife-in-the-back game.

  Perhaps I don't see the Big Picture, but to me it looks like a hell of a way to run a railroad.

  (I am aware that our own trade policies are criticized on somewhat similar grounds. But there is a big difference; we are very nearly economically self-sufficient and our tariffs and other laws have not been such as to ruin us in the respects in which we are not entirely self-sufficient. But none of the Commonwealth is self-sufficient; they need each other.)

  Another question that fretted my mind was the contrast between Uruguay and New Zealand. The two countries are comparable in size, in population density, in stable democratic government, in basic industries, each being a rich primary producer not yet heavily industrialized. Each country has a sheaf of most remarkable social-welfare laws which superficially add up to about the same thing. Yet New Zealand is a phony Utopia; its social measures are strangling it-while Uruguay appears to be a true Utopia, as near perfect as our race has achieved.

  I confess I do not know the answer to this one. I cannot see a basic difference in their laws and I have no evidence on which to attribute basic differences in the temperament of the two peoples. All I can see that it proves, if it proves anything, is that social security laws need not be destructive to high production and a high standard of living, if properly designed and wisely administered. My reservation weasels out of it, of course; I have not said anything. But I want to know why, for there is something to be learned here that could be of crucial importance to the United States. I intend to go back to Uruguay in the next year or two and stay until I think I have found the answer. But my temporary license as an apprentice pundit does not seem to warrant my answering now.

  However I do have a hunch. New Zealanders are addicted to price-fixing as a permanent (not just wartime) policy. King Canute could give them a few tips on this subject.

  The most important thing that I believe I have learned from a trip around our planet is that no progress whatsoever is being made on the prime problem facing the human race, that the problem is bigger than I had dreamed, and that, most tragically, it probably has no solution.

  I don't mean communism and I don't mean the chilling probability of atomic war; I mean something much worse: too many people.

  The basic problem was stated a century and a half ago by Dr. Malthus, then his depressing theory was "exploded" by new lands being opened, new farming methods, new advances in science-only it turned out not to have been exploded after all; his equations for starvation are working out to the last dismal decimal place. A modern discussion of it was published last year by Charles Darwin the Younger. There is no longer any way to get around it; this planet has too many mouths, too few acres.

  We beat the game for a long time by opening up new frontiers, but now there are no new frontiers to open up. The only place left for the billion people in China and the Indian subcontinent to spill over is into areas already occupied by the white Western nations.

  This fact is more explosive, more dangerous than H-bombs.

  I had known this-as who did not?-before this trip. We had certainly been told often enough, by flippant little paragraphs in Time magazine, by dry and rarely read hand-outs from UNESCO, through diagrams in atlases and geographies. But, for me, it took a personal look at the dreadful condition of Java to make the statistics about China and India and the other overpopulated areas come alive in my mind.

  The worst of it is that the problem won't hold still; it gets worse every day. We have already passed the crisis point; we need two and a half acres of farm land for each human, but we now have about one and a half. But there were eighteen million more people on earth when my wife and I came back from this trip than there were when we left; since we got home fifteen million more have been added-a total four times the population of Australia.

  Too little food, too many mouths. How will they be fed? Where will they sleep?

  It is barely possible that you and I will be able to duck the issue; our children must solve it or be overwhelmed by it. Not our grandchildren, but our children, for the problem grows too rapidly. The crisis is with us, the catastrophic outcome cannot be more than one generation away. More probably we ourselves will face it, in the form of World War III.

  Quite aside from the life-or-death practical matter of who will win the next war, when or if it comes, is the unavoidable moral problem: do we, with our acres to waste on golf courses and parks and tobacco fields, have the right to hang onto what we hold? Or are we, as our brothers' keepers, morally obligated to accept two or three million Asians as fast as they can be shipped to us?

  Are the ten million Australians and New Zealanders required by good morals to let the eighty million Indonesians swarm over them? I can give one sort of answer to that one. Both of the Anzac nations are strongly humanitarian at home-but they will fight and die to the last digger, the last Kiwi, before they will let that happen.

  But that does not solve the moral issue. My own ancestors came to this continent, pushed the Indians aside-or killed them-and made far better use of the land for far more people. I feel no special qualms about it now. But suppose the teeming crowds of Asia now give us the same treatment, seeing that we are making something less than maximum use of the land for maximum population. Have I any right to feel indignant?

  I will not duck the issue. I have always believed that a man who accepts capital punishment should not be too squeamish to serve his term as hangman. The tail goes with the
hide. I have not been able to find a moral answer which pleases me; nevertheless I know my answer-precisely that of the Australians. I'll fight before I'll let the spawning millions of Asia roll over Colorado and turn it into the sort of horizontal slum that Java is. Maybe this decision damns my soul; if so, so must it be. I don't see any solution to the problem of Asia at all, for they won't stop breeding . . . in fact, the psychological truth is almost certainly that they can't. But I am not willing to move over and give them room here to breed another hundred million-or half billion. We have here a pretty good nation, at least for the time being; I will not willingly see it turned into a slum.

  Are we our brothers' keepers? Just what does our Western culture owe to the rest of mankind? Let us not be too humble about it. It may well be true that the potentialities of all parts of the human race are about the same. Nevertheless that minority of the human race called loosely the Western democratic peoples and consisting mostly of Caucasians even though not identical with the Caucasian race has added twenty, eighty, a hundred times as much to human wealth, human knowledge, human dignity and freedom, as all the rest of the human race put together. Sanitation, scientific farming, mass production, civil liberties-these are our inventions, not theirs. We have shared them, what they would accept, and that is good-but we do not owe the teeming rest of the world a living!

  Lastly, this trip around the world cured me of One-Worldism; I have fully recovered and am as immune to it as I am to measles. The idea of one sovereign world nation, free forever of the peril of war, working together in peace and harmony, is an appealing one. I do wish we could afford it. But, the earth and the human race being what they are, we cannot. . . not unless we are willing to accept the logical and inevitable consequences. "One World" means a situation in which the United States is not sovereign, any more than one of our states is truly sovereign. That means that the United States would be outvoted . . . which just as certainly means that they would swarm over us immediately after counting the votes.