Consider, for instance, that at the beginning of our century, for the
first time in more than fifteen hundred years, the Christian nations
came into contact with a mighty pagan power, and were compelled to
acknowledge it as not only a political, but a moral, equal. Whoever
knows the magical effect in the quickening of intellectual and
spiritual life due to new contact with a contrasting type of national
culture will agree that the meeting thus of Christendom with the
so-called "heathen" world is a fact of prime significance in the
history of man.
Nor is it simply the contact of heathen and Christian on terms of moral
equality. There is another aspect to Japan's ascendancy and her
recognition by the West. The East and the West meet at last. The
psychic invasion of each by the other must be epoch-making and in the
direction of the completeness and unification spiritually of all
mankind in a brotherhood of nations and nation-states. The new contact
of heathen and Christian, and of white and colored, of East and West,
means that the exploitation of the dark races by nations more highly
organized on a basis of self-interest is about to cease forever. With
the humanization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes
who never divided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the
"have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical
universe.
Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many
in Old England thought--that there is nothing new under the sun? Then I
would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary
character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative
political and social equality, of immigrants from some fifty-one
different nations of the Old World. These people will mix their blood,
their temperaments, and their traditions, and not only will a new
variety of human being emerge, but the mixing of opposites in idea and
temperament will quicken self-consciousness and heighten mental power
and speed up its activity. The opportunity of the blond beasts of prey
has lain in the torpor and inactivity and ignorance of the multitude.
But I find no torpor in California. And where there is no one that will
allow himself to be preyed upon, even blond beasts take up the new
enterprise of co-operation among equals. This is an inevitable result
of the contact of many varieties of unlikes, the unification, not of
equals, but of supplementary equivalents. When such psychic conditions
have prevailed for a century or more, it is inconceivable that trade
can continue to consist of competition between individuals and the
permission of the successful to amass and hoard fortunes. Either
production and distribution will become communal, or the community will
tax large fortunes into the state and national treasury.
But there are three other distinguishing characteristics of the
twentieth century which make for the replacing of civilization by
humanization, and for the transition of trade from the harshness of the
law into the abounding grace of the gospel.