An American who in response to such an invitation as I have received speaks in
this University of ancient renown, cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the
interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand
associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are
living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them
and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no
stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been
for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the
Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many
different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so
that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those
Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I
think that as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the
English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or
Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in "the spacious days of
great Elizabeth," would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel.
Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship
in the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to penetrate the
causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the
present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get
a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous
procession of the ages, from the immemorial past
when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the creative forces "swathed their too-much
power," down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the
history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth,
growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate
as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise
before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world
of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century
have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and
in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other
pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance,
which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the water, is now on the
brink of carrying it into the air; of the science that finds its expression in such
extraordinary achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which
have so accelerated the velocity of movement in
social and industrial conditions—for the changes in the mechanical appliances
of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater than in all the
preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has no more
direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life than literature or music,
painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of
cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were
rather against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At
present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries,
the large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas
originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences become, at
least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of science in the
eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for
scientific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach
on other fields. This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only
have scientific men insisted upon the necessity
of considering the history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with
what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen a
demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both positions are in their
essence right; but as regards each position the more arrogant among the invaders of
the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent.
As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth
merely as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree that
accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative worth and
inter-relationship are just as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of
study. The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at
once from the category of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a
place in the always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction.
But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon
what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read
should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific historians, who
apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the
impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing that history
shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a
branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science
encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of
literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be
met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as
science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science
which shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians,
the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the
future writers of history, without losing the qualities which have made these men
great, shall also utilize the new facts and new methods which science has put at
their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise
about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville's place
is in both history and literature; no minute
study of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot—and Marbot is as
interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the branches of science
should likewise be treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman
interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history, shall have on
his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of
realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must
essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians of the past.
The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an exalted,
position, and the scientific historian who produces books which are not literature
must rest content with the honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that
belongs to him who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to
use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of literature, we
must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the scientific spirit, and using
the treasure-houses of science. He who would fully treat of man must know at least
something of biology, of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of that science of evolution
which is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin. Of course there is no
exact parallelism between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal
world, and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there
is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are
homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more than
accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the interpretation of human
history, we cannot at present say. The historian should never forget, what the
highest type of scientific man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to
admit ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, the way for
wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked
to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not
know. The research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands
first; but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us
to say that with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of the most
fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the higher forms of life, of
mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time necessary for
the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of years,
some millions of years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the
tertiary period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed
mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see
them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man substantially in the
physical shape in which we now know him, we also find a mammalian fauna not
essentially different in kind, though widely differing in distribution, from that of
the present day. Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds
type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet
understand only in the most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is
often turned into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these lectures, to us
nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now
differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in evolution by natural
selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study
their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which our
blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case the part of wisdom
is to say that we believe we have such and such partial explanations, but that we are
not warranted in saying that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of
the development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some
facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes for which we can
with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts as to which we grope in the
dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate
explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of terminology. In the changes, the
development and extinction, of species we must remember that such expressions as "a
new species," or as "a species becoming extinct," are each commonly and
indiscriminately used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
the "new" species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared later on the
globe's surface than those of any old species tottering to extinction.
Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent
back through countless generations, through æons of time, to the early stages
of the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a "new" species is that
from some cause, or set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly
develops into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that while in one form of
life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species continues to
exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from the ancestral type and a new
species appears.
Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term which has two entirely different
meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and leaving no descendants. Or it
may die out because as the generations go by
there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced. Thus in one case the
line of life comes to an end. In the other case it changes into something different.
The huge titanothere, and the small three-toed horse, both existed at what may
roughly be called the same period of the world's history, back in the middle of the
mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared and
that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But whereas all the
individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of the
three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing
as the ages went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses,
asses, and zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in the development
of human societies is striking. A further analogy is supplied by a very curious
tendency often visible in cases of intense and extreme specialization. When an animal
form becomes highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so
extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it
disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the less
specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking types, of the
preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide one period of
palæontological history from another, we can sometimes assign causes, and again
we cannot even guess at them. In the case of single species, or of faunas of very
restricted localities, the explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight
change in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in
vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge herbivores with a
bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or
so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could furnish this food. Again, we
now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower
forms of life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by
insects. There are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and
domestic, cannot live because of the presence
either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible
genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures which
are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these species, though
harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the
closely-related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to man himself,
being the cause of the "sleeping sickness" which in many large districts has killed
out the entire population. Of course the development or the extension of the range of
any such insects, and any one of many other causes which we see actually at work
around us, would readily account for the destruction of some given species or even
for the destruction of several species in a limited area of country.
When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is different, and
may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the knowledge we actually possess.
In the old arctogæal continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and
North America, the glacial period made a complete, but of course explicable, change
in the faunal life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a period of great cold
supervened, and a different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation of the change
is obvious.
But in many other cases we cannot so much as hazard a guess at why a given change
occurred. One of the most striking instances of these inexplicable changes is that
afforded by the history of South America towards the close of the tertiary period.
For ages South America had been an island by itself, cut off from North America at
the very time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with
Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America, some of the
types resembling nothing now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral
forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and
diversified mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar during his
career on this earth.
Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land between this
old South American island and North America, near what is now the Isthmus of Panama,
thereby making a bridge across which the teeming
animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer southern continent.
There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had
attained their development in the fierce competition of the arctogæal realm.
Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves,
bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers and
against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not only was the
character of the South American fauna totally changed by the invasion of these
creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over the continent, but it was also
changed through the development wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe
competition to which they were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types
died out. Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and thereby
saved themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South America soon became
populated with various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels,
horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes and some of them of
giant size, all of these being descended from the immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up
large autochthonous [TR: original autochthonus] ungulates, giant ground sloths
well-nigh as large as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but
structurally of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only
held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and
invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant in
species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge size or odd type,
and because of the terrific prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus
developed in South America, and flourished for a period which human history would
call very long indeed, but which geologically was short.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this fauna. All the
great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate befalling the changed
representatives of the old autochthonous fauna and the descendants of the migrants
that had come down from the north. Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and
mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America,
though still retaining its connection with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life small and weak
compared to that of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for
instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small
camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and
ant-eaters. In other words, it includes diminutive representatives of the giants of
the preceding era, both of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the
giants among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was widespread and
extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly inexplicable.
There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any cause which would account for the
extinction of so many species of huge or moderate size, while smaller
representatives, and here and there medium-sized representatives, of many of them
were left.
Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there are, if not
homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of human societies, in the
history of the rise to prominence, of the development and change, of the temporary
dominance, and death or transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form
races or nations. Here, as in biology, it is
necessary to keep in mind that we use each of the words "birth" and "death," "youth"
and "age," often very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally
different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing as an "old" or
a "young" nation, any more than there is an "old" or "young" family.
Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must be of exactly the same length
for every existing individual, and for every group of individuals, whether forming a
family or a nation. All that can properly be meant by the terms "new" and "young" is
that in a given line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid change.
This change may arise either from a new development or transformation of the old
elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with other and varied
elements; so that the words "new" nation or "young" nation may have a real difference
of significance in one case from what they have in another.
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the specialization
of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing, generalized or non-specialized
form; as, for instance, occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more complex cultivation
and civilization. This is what occurred, for instance, in Western Europe during the
centuries of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the
north. All the modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states
created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be called "new" or
"young" states in the sense that part or all of the people composing them were
descended from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that therefore, for
the first time, entered on the career of civilized communities. In the southern part
of Western Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the new kingdoms
first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence then extended back into the
cold forests from which the invaders had come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed
the rise of communities with essentially the same civilization as their southern
neighbors; though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there was no
infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same races
which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism.
The same was true of the Slavs and the slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an
infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine
culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of
the little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian
Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long established,
highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case the nation is usually spoken
of as a "young," and is correctly spoken of as a "new," nation; but the term should
always be used with a clear sense of the difference between what is described in such
case, and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation just
developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities compared to Tyre and
Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in every sense of the word as old in
the new city as in the old city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new
community compared with England or Scotland; but
the ancestral type of civilization and culture is as old in one case as in the other.
I of course do not mean for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere
fact that the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished many centuries
before in the original home of the race; I merely mean that the ancestral history is
the same in each case. We can rightly use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of
Canadians or Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely
different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as
those founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of astonishing
growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform
Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense
from that in which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around
Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy
forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities and
to form stable governments. The kingdoms of
Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were
also in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common
with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the Cæsars of Byzantium;
their social problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not true
of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine,
the United States, are all "new" nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but,
with whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general
European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences between
these "new" American and these "old" European nations are not as great as those which
separate the "new" nations one from another, and the "old" nations one from another.
There are in each case very real differences between the new and the old nation;
differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral
history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its attendant benefits
and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages are passed, the problems to be
solved, in spite of superficial differences, are in their essence the same; they are
those that confront all civilized peoples, not
those that confront only peoples struggling from barbarism into civilization.
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
St. 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 cannot 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 cannot 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
country-side 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 cannot 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 burned 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 horse-hoofs 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, cannot
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
Græco-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 over-shadowing
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 cannot 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 cannot 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 cannot 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 for ever
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 comers 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 cannot 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 cannot 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.