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Page 42
The outlook--the signs of the times, what are they? It is not given to
human vision, peering into the future, to see more than as through a
glass, darkly; men as trees walking, one cannot say certainly whither.
Yet signs may be noted even if they cannot be fully or precisely
interpreted; and among them I should certainly say is to be observed
the general outward impulse of all the civilized nations of the first
order of greatness--except our own. Bound and swathed in the
traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly
external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under
the specious plea of peace and plenty--fulness of bread--hug an ideal
of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with
which the world of European civilization must not only look forward
to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems
to await it. I say _we_ do so; I should more surely express my thought
by saying that the outward impulse already is in the majority of the
nation, as shown when particular occasions arouse their attention, but
that it is as yet retarded, and may be retarded perilously long, by
those whose views of national policy are governed by maxims framed in
the infancy of the Republic.
This outward impulse of the European nations, resumed on a large scale
after nearly a century of intermission, is not a mere sudden
appearance, sporadic, and unrelated to the past. The signs of its
coming, though unnoted, were visible soon after the century reached
its half-way stage, as was also its great correlative, equally
unappreciated then, though obvious enough now, the stirring of the
nations of Oriental civilization. It is a curious reminiscence of my
own that when in Yokohama, Japan, in 1868, I was asked to translate a
Spanish letter from Honolulu, relative to a ship-load of Japanese
coolies to be imported into Hawaii. I knew the person engaged to go as
physician to the ship, and, unless my memory greatly deceives me, he
sailed in this employment while I was still in the port. Similarly,
when my service on the station was ended, I went from Yokohama to
Hong-kong, prior to returning home by way of Suez. Among my
fellow-passengers was an ex-Confederate naval officer, whose business
was to negotiate for an immigration of Chinese into, I think, the
Southern States--in momentary despair, perhaps, of black labor--but
certainly into the United States. We all know what has come in our own
country of undertakings which then had attracted little attention.
It is odd to watch the unconscious, resistless movements of nations,
and at the same time read the crushing characterization by our
teachers of the press of those who, by personal characteristics or by
accident, happen to be thrust into the position of leaders, when at
the most they only guide to the least harm forces which can no more be
resisted permanently than can gravitation. Such would have been the
r�le of Nicholas, guiding to a timely end the irresistible course of
events in the Balkans, which his opponents sought to withstand, but
succeeded only in prolonging and aggravating. He is honored now by
those who see folly in the imperial aspirations of Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, and piracy in Mr. Cecil Rhodes; yet, after all, in his
day, what right had he, by the code of strict constructionists of
national legal rights, to put Turkey to death because she was sick?
Was not Turkey in occupation? Had she not, by strict law, a right to
her possessions, and to live; yea, and to administer what she
considered justice to those who were legally her subjects? But men are
too apt to forget that law is the servant of equity, and that while
the world is in its present stage of development equity which cannot
be had by law must be had by force, upon which ultimately law rests,
not for its sanction, but for its efficacy.
We have been familiar latterly with the term "buffer states;" the
pleasant function discharged by Siam between Great Britain and France.
Though not strictly analogous, the term conveys an idea of the
relations that have hitherto obtained between Eastern and Western
civilizations. They have existed apart, each a world of itself; but
they are approaching not only in geographical propinquity, a
recognized source of danger, but, what is more important, in common
ideas of material advantage, without a corresponding sympathy in
spiritual ideas. It is not merely that the two are in different stages
of development from a common source, as are Russia and Great Britain.
They are running as yet on wholly different lines, springing from
conceptions radically different. To bring them into correspondence in
that, the most important realm of ideas, there is needed on the one
side--or on the other--not growth, but conversion. However far it has
wandered, and however short of its pattern it has come, the
civilization of modern Europe grew up under the shadow of the Cross,
and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It
is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage
than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of
Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,--as agnostic countries.
But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind
it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never known
Christianity.
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