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Page 47
History at times reveals her foresight concrete in the action of a
great individuality like C�sar'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 C�sar, or of any few men? To whatever cause we may assign
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 mass, 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 aptitude 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 C�sar'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 retard 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 accumulating 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?
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