Unsegmented source body · Part 2

So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a nation, or a civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared. Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed into something absolutely different from what they were. In the United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of absorption into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of the five representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and culture of the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but it is reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows through the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been much intermixture, from many different foreign sources--from foreign conquerors and from foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin.

As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New World which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another; and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan’s empire, the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization. When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to describe totally different phenomena.

The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly than their predecessors of a couple of generations back, how artificial most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and faith in their own and their fellow countrymen’s purity of descent from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues, English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure blood of each race found speaking each language.

Aryan and Teutonic are terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they have any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is so doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether the ancestors of most of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe, from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents of the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the term Anglo-Saxon itself.

Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed sink into littleness.

An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities, of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a general correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders, their differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and Yorkshireman in England.

In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of instances in the history of life on this planet.

Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the average woman ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a countryside of peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does not explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so far as different matters were concerned; at one time as regards literature, at another time as regards architecture, at another time as regards city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome’s dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and therefore far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but in Africa? We can not even guess why the springs of one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in the future.

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burnt itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so many countries: no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day; then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves and play again a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered in helpless misery among the horsehoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new birth.

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one time seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of a national type can be found than in the case of the Greco-Roman dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po. The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion, and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside them a new type, the Arab.

Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while it has lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts, save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out before we can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean the actual dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how little permanent change in the physical make-up of the people seems to have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the races in historic times.

A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent revolution, no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written records to indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of the locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the new environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land?

Or, as the strains mingled, has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large populations where the old physical type has once more become dominant? Here in England, the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the round barrows--have they blended, or has one or the other type actually died out; or are they merged in some older race which they seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue and civilization of some later race which seemingly destroyed them? We can not say. We do not know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan tongues represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan type, nor where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its language on other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood accompanied the change of tongue.

The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can and those which can not be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over the world, as well as an altogether unexampled advance in man’s dominion over nature; and this together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and development has been that of one race, the so-called white race, or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples living in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to Greece and Rome.

The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race. It is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor, had on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe. More than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia. Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much of it represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood. During this period substantially all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent. The first exception of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation--a phenomenon unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the West.

During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead. The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering-time was as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets, and painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we can not lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.

About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the world’s waste spaces.

Comparison is often made between the empire of Britain and the empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more important, simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the stream’s current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years, there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and abounding interest and importance of their careers.

In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus, she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into which Alexander’s kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House of Barca, which rendered the struggle forever memorable. It was the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened her but to die.

On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all corners the right to the world’s waste spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.

Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool. No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman; but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and Australia--a diminution so great that, if it continues for the next century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years, all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward.

There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third- and fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked, comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle’s prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered.

However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.

A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of substance, then high success was really theirs.

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the world’s surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present based on what has happened in the past. While freely admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest necessary connection between any weakening of virile force and this advance in the moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one’s neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong.

We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a state; and they were also as strong men as ever founded or saved a state. Surely such examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to produce.

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of some one else.

True liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social revolution which, in destroying individual rights--including property rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head.

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded, that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale hitherto unexampled, to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation.

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races, because they differ from one another far more widely than some of them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves.

On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each man and each woman that elementary justice which will permit him or her to gain from life the reward which should always accompany thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and hard and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man should receive.

The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other. The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible foe.

But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience. For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an individual in dealing with other individuals.

I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.

THE WORLD MOVEMENT

THE WORLD MOVEMENT[3]

I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.

[3] Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this university covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.] But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for, properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.

The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present--and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.

Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a “world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.

With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically these three peoples--although, judged even by the history of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.

The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.

The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind.

In many of the forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.

This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.

With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.

During this period there were several very important extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any European influence.

Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.

At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as varied as it is striking.

In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

There are, of course, many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.

Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres; but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the details of that practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort.

Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before.

So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.

The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same as regards military science.

At the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been--sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded, the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human life.

A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern life.

Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in an ironless age--and, later on, in an age without coal--and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the human race.