one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should
govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just
as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other.
The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases,
because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction
of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his
rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the
police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the
kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the
most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state
of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of
arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that
lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the
unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples
who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible
foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and
the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and
iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong;
and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence
upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that
marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his
fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience.
For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged
especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those
years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face
of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an
individual in dealing with other individuals.
I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a
right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several
countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of
doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily
for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer
souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us
hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children
and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our
places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether
this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least
the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch
in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close,
and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at
least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
THE WORLD MOVEMENT[3]
I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of
Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence.
It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the
feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a
country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the
case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks
with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all
the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany.
More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the
West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the
Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history
of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise
of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore
ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society
and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders,
city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the
seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat
back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
[3] Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman
Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working
for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the
Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great,
the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab
and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old
heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild
horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion
in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the
Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery:
Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders
from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled
these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became
Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began
to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the
centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now
well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and
in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted
hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern
rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding
position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to
this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young
nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of
the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited
or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every
inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German
strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has
been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers
whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the
American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low
Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we
have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our
veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations
American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to
the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the
intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in
every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of
to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life
of this university covers the period during which that movement has
spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity
has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has
changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and
appropriate here to speak on this subject.
When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this
planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight.
Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal
degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general
law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature,
changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life
of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups
of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary
beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call
civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far
the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living
world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been
before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the
development of life generally and what has gone on in the development
of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.]
But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along
but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages
we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary
discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and
the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at
the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the
half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them
except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not
the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which
separated man from brute.
Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric
or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given
localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that
was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what,
if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we
have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly
how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many
cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered
the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed
the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact.
In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at
the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over
the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a
certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at
the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage
souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that
had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves
of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to
the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which
Stonehenge is the type.
The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in
that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate
present--and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when
compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this
planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia
and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far
as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural
development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us
to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern
Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese
civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.
Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the
striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were
the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness.
The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates
are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds,
leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of
centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action
and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the
movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual,
was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of
mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement
was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly
localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain
conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the
domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread
the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a
“world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable
globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as
peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.
With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into
prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be
said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can
consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to
be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man,
when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically
these three peoples--although, judged even by the history of which we
have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of
little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus,
until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under
the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died.
In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the
most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of
mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies
left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more
varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that
affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first
time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world
movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of
the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably
the most important of all that was happening in world history at the
time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had
greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by
the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization
affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there
was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind
from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to
the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas.
Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences
which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to
affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science,
in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition
to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose
concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life.
Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and
understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we
come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers,
whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose
writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there
were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like
Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the
centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were
so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for
them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge.
The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by
the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement;
and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming
destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the
reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed
between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later
which fully avenged it.
This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In
its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among
those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our
descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more
thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests
were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its
ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.
With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and
it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years
passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European
civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned.
During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation
of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing
back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the
Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted
with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or
period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression
universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle
Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed
the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some
points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below
the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry,
of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of serene
spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of
violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded
that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its
scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.
During this period there were several very important extra-European
movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose,
and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races
into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able
to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing
European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and
here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the
civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured
peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered
development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any
European influence.
Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the
unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and
terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun
and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes
of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and
destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in
no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward
a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning
of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with
the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures
which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two
epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material
and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should
thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that
had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of
intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names
of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man
was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time
experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization.
Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity
and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects
during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or
two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of
the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations.
From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than
anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there
has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of
organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural
resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an
immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as
varied as it is striking.
In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their
conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically
vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in
organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of
military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these
two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time
there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a
world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of
Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every
sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been
ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and
new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely
or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate
and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in
portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the
conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for
the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators,
as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical
America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has
been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and
radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most
extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth
and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the
most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past
history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet
with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient
ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized
nations of mankind.
There are, of course, many grades between these different types of
influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last
four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises
a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There
are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is
at present no large space of territory in which the general movement
of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This
represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been
seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was
felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over
much the larger part of the world the process of change and development
was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman
Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in
action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped
immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is
bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred
rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.