Part 5 (1/2)

Of China we know less; but many observers testify to the immense latent force of the Chinese character. It has shown itself hitherto chiefly in the strength with which it has adhered to stereotyped tradition. But stereotyped traditions have been overthrown already more than once even in this unprogressive people, whose conservatism, due largely to ignorance of better conditions existing in other lands, is closely allied also to the unusual staying powers of the race, to the persistence of purpose, the endurance, and the vitality characteristic of its units. To ambition for individual material improvement they are not insensible. The collapse of the Chinese organization in all its branches during the late war with j.a.pan, though greater than was expected, was not unforeseen. It has not altered the fact that the raw material so miserably utilized is, in point of strength, of the best; that it is abundant, racially h.o.m.ogeneous, and is multiplying rapidly. Nor, with the recent resuscitation of the Turkish army before men's eyes, can it be thought unlikely that the Chinese may yet obtain the organization by which alone potential force receives adequate military development, the most easily conferred because the simplest in conception. The j.a.panese have shown great capacity, but they met little resistance; and it is easier by far to move and to control an island kingdom of forty millions than a vast continental territory containing near tenfold that number of inhabitants. Comparative slowness of evolution may be predicated, but that which for so long has kept China one, amid many diversities, may be counted upon in the future to insure a substantial unity of impulse which, combined with its ma.s.s, will give tremendous import to any movement common to the whole.

To a.s.sert that a few selected characteristics, such as the above, summarize the entire tendency of a century of teeming human life, and stand alone among the signs that are chiefly to be considered in looking to the future, would be to take an untenable position. It may be said safely, however, that these factors, because the future to which they point is more remote, are less regarded than others which are less important; and further, that those among them which mark our own day are also the factors whose very existence is specially resented, criticised, and condemned by that school of political thought which a.s.sumes for itself the t.i.tle of economical, which attained its maturity, and still lives, amid the ideas of that stage of industrial progress coincident with the middle of the century, and which sees all things from the point of view of production and of internal development. Powerfully exerted throughout the world, nowhere is the influence of this school so unchecked and so injurious as in the United States, because, having no near neighbors to compete with us in point of power, military necessities have been to us not imminent, so that, like all distant dangers, they have received little regard; and also because, with our great resources only partially developed, the instinct to external activities has remained dormant.

At the same period and from the same causes that the European world turned its eyes inward from the seaboard, instead of outward, the people of the United States were similarly diverted from the external activities in which at the beginning of the century they had their wealth. This tendency, emphasized on the political side by the civil war, was reinforced and has been prolonged by well-known natural conditions. A territory much larger, far less redeemed from its original wildness, and with perhaps even ampler proportionate resources than the continent of Europe, contained a much smaller number of inhabitants. Hence, despite an immense immigration, we have lagged far behind in the work of completing our internal development, and for that reason have not yet felt the outward impulse that now markedly characterizes the European peoples. That we stand far apart from the general movement of our race calls of itself for consideration.

For the reasons mentioned it has been an easy but a short-sighted policy, wherever it has been found among statesmen or among journalists, to fasten attention purely on internal and economical questions, and to reject, if not to resent, propositions looking towards the organization and maintenance of military force, or contemplating the extension of our national influence beyond our own borders, on the plea that we have enough to do at home,--forgetful that no nation, as no man, can live to itself or die to itself. It is a policy in which we are behind our predecessors of two generations ago, men who had not felt the deadening influence of merely economical ideas, because they reached manhood before these attained the preponderance they achieved under politicians of the Manchester school; a preponderance which they still retain because the youths of that time, who grew up under them, have not yet quite pa.s.sed off the stage. It is the lot of each generation, salutary no doubt, to be ruled by men whose ideas are essentially those of a former day.

Breaches of continuity in national action are thus moderated or avoided; but, on the other hand, the tendency of such a condition is to blind men to the spirit of the existing generation, because its rulers have the tone of their own past, and direct affairs in accordance with it. On the very day of this writing there appears in an American journal a slas.h.i.+ng contrast between the action of Lord Salisbury in the Cretan business and the spirited letter of Mr.

Gladstone upon the failure of the Concert. As a matter of fact, however, both those British statesmen, while belonging to parties traditionally opposed, are imbued above all with the ideas of the middle of the century, and, governed by them, consider the disturbance of quiet the greatest of all evils. It is difficult to believe that if Mr. Gladstone were now in his prime, and in power, any object would possess in his eyes an importance at all comparable to that of keeping the peace. He would feel for the Greeks, doubtless, as Lord Salisbury doubtless does; but he would maintain the Concert as long as he believed that alone would avoid war. When men in sympathy with the ideas now arising among Englishmen come on the stage, we shall see a change--not before.

The same spirit has dominated in our own country ever since the civil war--a far more real ”revolution” in its consequences than the struggle of the thirteen colonies against Great Britain, which in our national speech has received the name--forced our people, both North and South, to withdraw their eyes from external problems, and to concentrate heart and mind with pa.s.sionate fervor upon an internal strife, in which one party was animated by the inspiring hope of independence, while before the other was exalted the n.o.ble ideal of union. That war, however, was directed, on the civil side, by men who belonged to a generation even then pa.s.sing away. The influence of their own youth reverted with the return of peace, and was to be seen in the ejection--by threat of force--of the third Napoleon from Mexico, in the acquisition of Alaska, and in the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish islands and of Samana Bay. Whatever may have been the wisdom of these latter attempts,--and the writer, while sympathizing with the spirit that suggested them, questions it from a military, or rather naval, stand-point,--they are particularly interesting as indicating the survival in elderly men of the traditions accepted in their youth, but foreign to the generation then rapidly coming into power, which rejected and frustrated them.

The latter in turn is now disappearing, and its successors, coming and to come, are crowding into its places. Is there any indication of the ideas these bring with them, in their own utterances, or in the spirit of the world at large, which they must needs reflect; or, more important perhaps still, is there any indication in the conditions of the outside world itself which they should heed, and the influence of which they should admit, in modifying and shaping their policies, before these have become hardened into fixed lines, directive for many years of the future welfare of their people?

To all these questions the writer, as one of the departing generation, would answer yes; but it is to the last that his attention, possibly by const.i.tutional bias, is more naturally directed. It appears to him that in the ebb and flow of human affairs, under those mysterious impulses the origin of which is sought by some in a personal Providence, by some in laws not yet fully understood, we stand at the opening of a period when the question is to be settled decisively, though the issue may be long delayed, whether Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate throughout the earth and to control its future. The great task now before the world of civilized Christianity, its great mission, which it must fulfil or perish, is to receive into its own bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered,--the civilizations at the head of which stand China, India, and j.a.pan.

This, to cite the most striking of the many forms in which it is presented to us, is surely the mission which Great Britain, sword ever at hand, has been discharging towards India; but that stands not alone. The history of the present century has been that of a constant increasing pressure of our own civilization upon these older ones, till now, as we cast our eyes in any direction, there is everywhere a stirring, a rousing from sleep, drowsy for the most part, but real, unorganized as yet, but conscious that that which rudely interrupts their dream of centuries possesses over them at least two advantages,--power and material prosperity,--the things which unspiritual humanity, the world over, most craves.

What the ultimate result will be it would be vain to prophesy,--the data for a guess even are not at hand; but it is not equally impossible to note present conditions, and to suggest present considerations, which may shape proximate action, and tend to favor the preponderance of that form of civilization which we cannot but deem the most promising for the future, not of our race only, but of the world at large. We are not living in a perfect world, and we may not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally perfect. Time and staying power must be secured for ourselves by that rude and imperfect, but not ign.o.ble, arbiter, force,--force potential and force organized,--which so far has won, and still secures, the greatest triumphs of good in the checkered history of mankind. Our material advantages, once noted, will be recognized readily and appropriated with avidity; while the spiritual ideas which dominate our thoughts, and are weighty in their influence over action, even with those among us who do not accept historic Christianity or the ordinary creeds of Christendom, will be rejected for long. The eternal law, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual, will obtain here, as in the individual, and in the long history of our own civilization. Between the two there is an interval, in which force must be ready to redress any threatened disturbance of an equal balance between those who stand on divergent planes of thought, without common standards.

And yet more is this true if, as is commonly said, faith is failing among ourselves, if the progress of our own civilization is towards the loss of those spiritual convictions upon which it was founded, and which in early days were mighty indeed towards the overthrowing of strongholds of evil. What, in such a case, shall play the tremendous part which the Church of the Middle Ages, with all its defects and with all the shortcomings of its ministers, played amid the ruin of the Roman Empire and the flood of the barbarians? If our own civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus press upon us,--in either event we need time, and time can be gained only by organized material force.

Nor is this view advanced in any spirit of unfriendliness to the other ancient civilizations, whose genius admittedly has been and is foreign to our own. One who believes that G.o.d has made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on the face of the whole earth cannot but check and repress, if he ever feels, any movement of aversion to mankind outside his own race. But it is not necessary to hate Carthage in order to admit that it was well for mankind that Rome triumphed; and we at this day, and men to all time, may be thankful that a few decades after the Punic Wars the genius of Caesar so expanded the bounds of the dominions of Rome, so extended, settled, and solidified the outworks of her civilization and polity, that when the fated day came that her power in turn should reel under the shock of conquest, with which she had remodelled the world, and she should go down herself, the time of the final fall was protracted for centuries by these exterior defences. They who began the a.s.sault as barbarians entered upon the imperial heritage no longer aliens and foreigners, but impregnated already with the best of Roman ideas, converts to Roman law and to Christian faith.

”When the course of history,” says Mommsen, ”turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the Senate House and in the streets of Rome, we may be allowed--on the threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world--to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Caesar was not the most important result of that grand enterprise,--far more momentous than the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain.

Inasmuch as Caesar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world, inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defence down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more remote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's country, he gained for the h.e.l.lenic-Italian culture the interval necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the East.... Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried h.e.l.lenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that Caesar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result.... That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of h.e.l.las and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe cla.s.sic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmana.s.sar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden,--all this is the work of Caesar.”

History at times reveals her foresight concrete in the action of a great individuality like Caesar's. More often her profounder movements proceed from impulses whose origin and motives cannot be traced, although a succession of steps may be discerned and their results stated. A few names, for instance, emerge amid the obscure movements of the peoples which precipitated the outer peoples upon the Roman Empire, but, with rare exceptions, they are simply exponents, pushed forward and upward by the torrent; at the utmost guides, not controllers, of those whom they represent but do not govern. It is much the same now. The peoples of European civilization, after a period of comparative repose, are again advancing all along the line, to occupy not only the desert places of the earth, but the debatable grounds, the buffer territories, which hitherto have separated them from those ancient nations, with whom they now soon must stand face to face and border to border. But who will say that this vast general movement represents the thought, even the unconscious thought, of any one man, as Caesar, or of any few men? To whatever cause we may a.s.sign it, whether to the simple conception of a personal Divine Monarchy that shapes our ends, or to more complicated ultimate causes, the responsibility rests upon the shoulders of no individual men.

Necessity is laid upon the peoples, and they move, like the lemmings of Scandinavia; but to man, being not without understanding like the beasts that perish, it is permitted to ask, ”Whither?” and ”What shall be the end hereof?” Does this tend to universal peace, general disarmament, and treaties of permanent arbitration? Is it the harbinger of ready mutual understanding, of quick acceptance of, and delight in, opposing traditions and habits of life and thought? Is such quick acceptance found now where Easterns and Westerns impinge?

Does contact forebode the speedy disappearance of great armies and navies, and dictate the wisdom of dispensing with that form of organized force which at present is embodied in them?

What, then, will be the actual conditions when these civilizations, of diverse origin and radically distinct,--because the evolution of racial characteristics radically different,--confront each other without the interposition of any neutral belt, by the intervention of which the contrasts, being more remote, are less apparent, and within which distinctions shade one into the other?

There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers, and those numbers, however incoherent now in ma.s.s, composed of units which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest survives. Deficient, apparently, in apt.i.tude for political and social organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable.

This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which, as compared to ourselves, they now labor. But men do not covet less the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create,--a trait wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force.

Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Caesar's, may have erected against them. Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned--forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits.

Nevertheless, even under such conditions,--which obtained increasingly during the decline of the Roman Empire,--positions suitably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to r.e.t.a.r.d and, by gaining time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is, and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations to-day. Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts of our civilization, and acc.u.mulating the line of defences which will permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to this day.

Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of the world as in the political development and material prosperity which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in commerce and in war. To these energies the mechanical and scientific acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in material well-being existing between those within its borders and those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the same advantages. And along with this preeminence in wealth arises the cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the world, were already run, and the goal of universal peace not only reached but secured. Yet are conditions such, even within our favored borders, that we are ready to disband the particular organized manifestation of physical force which we call the police?

Despite internal jealousies and friction on the continent of Europe, perhaps even because of them, the solidarity of the European family therein contained is shown in this great common movement, the ultimate beneficence of which is beyond all doubt, as evidenced by the British domination in India and Egypt, and to which the habit of arms not only contributes, but is essential. India and Egypt are at present the two most conspicuous, though they are not the sole, ill.u.s.trations of benefits innumerable and lasting, which rest upon the power of the sword in the hands of enlightenment and justice. It is possible, of course, to confuse this conclusion, to obscure the real issue, by dwelling upon details of wrongs at times inflicted, of blunders often made. Any episode in the struggling progress of humanity may be thus perplexed; but looking at the broad result, it is indisputable that the vast gains to humanity made in the regions named not only once originated, but still rest, upon the exertion and continued maintenance of organized physical force.

The same general solidarity as against the outside world, which is unconsciously manifested in the general resumption of colonizing movements, receives particular conscious expression in the idea of imperial federation, which, amid the many buffets and reverses common to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense practical difficulties have to be overcome, in order to realize the ends towards which such sentiments point, is but a commonplace of human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the const.i.tutional lion in the path, which the unwilling or the apprehensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words of one who never lightly admitted impossibilities, ”If a thing is necessary to be done, the more difficulties, the more necessary to try to remove them.” As sentiment strengthens, it undermines obstacles, and they crumble before it.

The same tendency is shown in the undeniable disposition of the British people and of British, statesmen to cultivate the good-will of the United States, and to draw closer the relations between the two countries. For the disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Balfour has used an expression, ”race patriotism,”--a phrase which finds its first approximation, doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but which may well extend its embrace, in a time yet distant, to all those who have drawn their present civilization from the same remote sources. The phrase is so pregnant of solution for the problems of the future, as conceived by the writer, that he hopes to see it obtain the currency due to the value of the idea which it formulates. That this disposition on the part of Great Britain, towards her colonies and towards the United States, shows sound policy as well as sentiment, may be granted readily; but why should sound policy, the seeking of one's own advantage, if by open and honest means, be imputed as a crime? In democracies, however, policy cannot long dispute the sceptre with sentiment. That there is lukewarm response in the United States is due to that narrow conception which grew up with the middle of the century, whose a.n.a.logue in Great Britain is the Little England party, and which in our own country would turn all eyes inward, and see no duty save to ourselves. How shall two walk together except they be agreed? How shall there be true sympathy between a nation whose political activities are world-wide, and one that eats out its heart in merely internal political strife? When we begin really to look abroad, and to busy ourselves with our duties to the world at large in our generation--and not before--we shall stretch out our hands to Great Britain, realizing that in unity of heart among the English-speaking races lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful days ahead.

In the determination of the duties of nations, nearness is the most conspicuous and the most general indication. Considering the American states as members of the European family, as they are by traditions, inst.i.tutions, and languages, it is in the Pacific, where the westward course of empire again meets the East, that their relations to the future of the world become most apparent. The Atlantic, bordered on either sh.o.r.e by the European family in the strongest and most advanced types of its political development, no longer severs, but binds together, by all the facilities and abundance of water communications, the once divided children of the same mother; the inheritors of Greece and Rome, and of the Teutonic conquerors of the latter. A limited express or a flying freight may carry a few pa.s.sengers or a small bulk overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific more rapidly than modern steamers can cross the former ocean, but for the vast amounts in numbers or in quant.i.ty which are required for the full fruition of communication, it is the land that divides, and not the sea. On the Pacific coast, severed from their brethren by desert and mountain range, are found the outposts, the exposed pioneers of European civilization, whom it is one of the first duties of the European family to bind more closely to the main body, and to protect, by due foresight over the approaches to them on either side.

It is in this political fact, and not in the weighing of merely commercial advantages, that is to be found the great significance of the future ca.n.a.l across the Central American isthmus, as well as the importance of the Caribbean Sea; for the latter is inseparably intwined with all international consideration of the isthmus problem.