probably seven or eight millions of people, died by violence or by
starvation. Then the English came in; put an end to the independence
and self-government which had wrought this hideous evil; restored
order, kept the peace, and gave to each individual a liberty which,
during the evil days of their own self-government, not one human being
possessed, save only the blood-stained tyrant who at the moment was
ruler. I stopped at village after village in the Sudan, and in many of
them I was struck by the fact that, while there were plenty of
children, they were all under twelve years old; and inquiry always
developed that these children were known as "Government children,"
because in the days of Mahdism it was the literal truth that in a very
large proportion of the communities every child was either killed or
died of starvation and hardship, whereas under the peace brought by
English rule families are flourishing, men and women are no longer
hunted to death, and the children are brought up under more favorable
circumstances, for soul and body, than have ever previously obtained
in the entire history of the Sudan. In administration, in education,
in police work, the Sirdar[12] and his lieutenants, great and small,
have performed to perfection a task equally important and difficult.
The Government officials, civil and military, who are responsible for
this task, and the Egyptian and Sudanese who have worked with and
under them, and as directed by them, have a claim upon all civilized
mankind which should be heartily admitted. It would be a crime not to
go on with the work, a work which the inhabitants themselves are
helpless to perform, unless under firm and wise guidance from outside.
I have met people who had some doubt as to whether the Sudan would
pay. Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my
judgment, this fact does not alter the duty of England to stay there.
It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation
is willing when the necessity arises to undertake a big task. I feel
about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we
acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task,
there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether
it would pay. I always answered that it was one of the great world
works which had to be done; that it was our business as a nation to do
it, if we were ready to make good our claim to be treated as a great
world Power; and that as we were unwilling to abandon the claim, no
American worth his salt ought to hesitate about performing the task. I
feel just the same way about you in the Sudan.
[12] Sir Reginald Wingate, who at the time of this address was
both Sirdar of the Anglo-Egyptian Army and Governor-General of the
Sudan.--L.F.A.
Now as to Egypt. It would not be worth my while to speak to you at
all, nor would it be worth your while to listen, unless on condition
that I say what I deeply feel ought to be said. I speak as an
outsider, but in one way this is an advantage, for I speak without
national prejudice. I would not talk to you about your own internal
affairs here at home; but you are so very busy at home that I am not
sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least,
abroad. At any rate, it can do you no harm to hear the view of one who
has actually been on the ground, and has information at first hand; of
one, moreover, who, it is true, is a sincere well-wisher of the
British Empire, but who is not English by blood, and who is impelled
to speak mainly because of his deep concern in the welfare of mankind
and in the future of civilization. Remember also that I who address
you am not only an American, but a Radical, a real--not a
mock--democrat, and that what I have to say is spoken chiefly because
I am a democrat, a man who feels that his first thought is bound to be
the welfare of the masses of mankind, and his first duty to war
against violence and injustice and wrong-doing, wherever found; and I
advise you only in accordance with the principles on which I have
myself acted as American President in dealing with the Philippines.
In Egypt you are not only the guardians of your own interests; you are
also the guardians of the interests of civilization; and the present
condition of affairs in Egypt is a grave menace to both your Empire
and the entire civilized world. You have given Egypt the best
government it has had for at least two thousand years--probably a
better government than it has ever had before; for never in history
has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary
laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy, under a rule as
free from corruption and brutality, as during the last twenty-eight
years. Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in
connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha
three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have
erred; and it is for you to make good your error. It has been an error
proceeding from the effort to do too much and not too little in the
interests of the Egyptians themselves; but unfortunately it is
necessary for all of us who have to do with uncivilized peoples, and
especially with fanatical peoples, to remember that in such a
situation as yours in Egypt weakness, timidity, and sentimentality may
cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all
broken reeds, sentimentality[13] is the most broken reed on which
righteousness can lean.
[13] In the Introduction will be found Mr. Roosevelt's
differentiation of sentimentality from sentiment.--L.F.A.
In Egypt you have been treating all religions with studied fairness
and impartiality; and instead of gratefully acknowledging this, a
noisy section of the native population takes advantage of what your
good treatment has done to bring about an anti-foreign movement, a
movement in which, as events have shown, murder on a large or a small
scale is expected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha[14] was the
best and most competent Egyptian official, a steadfast upholder of
English rule, and an earnest worker for the welfare of his countrymen;
and he was murdered simply and solely because of these facts, and
because he did his duty wisely, fearlessly, and uprightly. The
attitude of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist Party in connection
with this murder has shown that they were neither desirous nor capable
of guaranteeing even that primary justice the failure to supply which
makes self-government not merely an empty but a noxious farce. Such
are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to
help the Egyptians towards self-government is taken advantage of by
them, not to make things better, not to help their country, but to try
to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary
duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to
establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that
end.
[14] Compare the address at the University of Cairo.--L.F.A.
It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went
into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample
justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity
of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and
willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in
Egypt or you have not; either it is or it is not your duty to
establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to
be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there,
why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that
your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great
traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name
agree and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the
responsibility which is yours. It is the thing, not the form, which is
vital; if the present forms of government in Egypt, established by you
in the hope that they would help the Egyptians upward, merely serve to
provoke and permit disorder, then it is for you to alter the forms;
for if you stay in Egypt it is your first duty to keep order, and
above all things also to punish murder and to bring to justice all who
directly or indirectly incite others to commit murder or condone the
crime when it is committed. When a people treats assassination as the
corner-stone of self-government, it forfeits all right to be treated
as worthy of self-government. You are in Egypt for several purposes,
and among them one of the greatest is the benefit of the Egyptian
people. You saved them from ruin by coming in, and at the present
moment, if they are not governed from outside, they will again sink
into a welter of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I hope and
believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation.
* * * * *
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[15]
[15] The text of this Lecture, which is the Romanes Lecture for
1910, is included in the present volume under the courteous
permission of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Oxford.--L.F.A.
Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910
An American who in response to such an invitation as I have received
speaks in this University of ancient renown, cannot but feel with
peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught
as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and
all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the
minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who
dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are
no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My
people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I
am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the
Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came
from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people
is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more
and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the
old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that as time
goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the
English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my
ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come
to Oxford in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," would have felt
far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in
the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in
the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to
penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind
but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
from the immemorial past when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the
creative forces "swathed their too-much power," down to the yesterday,
a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man
became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of
animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the
highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when
we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by
the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits.
I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for
instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and
the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the
science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements
as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so
accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial
conditions--for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary
life during the last three generations have been greater than in all
the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know
something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather
against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge.
At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in
scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and
the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled
in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is
particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what
biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has
arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science.
Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each
position the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of
knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As
regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat
history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must
of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and
appreciation of their relative worth and inter-relationship are just
as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study. The
fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it
at once from the category of history, however much it may still
deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes
which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at
least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to
be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should
be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by
some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold
that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the
impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing
that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on
condition that it also remains a branch of literature; and,
furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the
field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of
literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which
can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to
include literature as well as science, is the need of books for
scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be
readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians,
the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need
merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new
facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness
is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise about
St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
Joinville's place is in both history and literature; no minute study
of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is
as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art
of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than
the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics
which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of
realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the
future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great
historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an
honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian
who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the
honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him
who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to
use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in
the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He
who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology,
of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and
especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably connected
with the great name of Darwin. Of course there is no exact parallelism
between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world,
and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet
there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be
that there are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more
than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
interpretation of human history, we cannot at present say. The
historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man
is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance
is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and,
moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts
of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full
significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The
research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge
stands first; but second only stands the research which, while
enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say that
with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of
the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the
higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by
since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find
the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life
on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see
them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man
substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him, we also
find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, though
widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned
into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of
the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by
mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study
their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work
which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the
case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and
such partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying
that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the
development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals,
there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and
sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons.
There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast
changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate
explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species
we must remember that such expressions as "a new species," or as "a
species becoming extinct," are each commonly and indiscriminately
used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
the "new" species is not new in the sense that its ancestors
appeared later on the globe's surface than those of any old
species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now
living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent back through
countless generations, through æons of time, to the early stages of
the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a "new"
species is that from some cause, or set of causes, one of these
ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form unlike any
that has preceded it; so that while in one form of life the ancestral
type is continuously repeated and the old species continues to exist,
in another form of life there is a deviation from the ancestral type
and a new species appears.
Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term which has two entirely
different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations
go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced.
Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case
it changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the
small three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the
same period of the world's history, back in the middle of the
mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely
disappeared and that nothing like either is to be found in the world
to-day. But whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out,
leaving no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave
descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages
went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed
horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in the
development of human societies is striking. A further analogy is
supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of intense
and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes highly
specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so
extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely
guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly
come from the less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant,
and striking types, of the preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide
one period of palæontological history from another, we can sometimes
assign causes, and again we cannot even guess at them. In the case of
single species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the
explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in
the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in
vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge
herbivores with a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of
food, and with teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds
of plants could furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most
deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms of
life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the
blood by insects. There are districts in South America where many
large animals, wild and domestic, cannot live because of the presence
either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there
is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of
microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain of the higher
vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to
all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the
closely-related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to
man himself, being the cause of the "sleeping sickness" which in many
large districts has killed out the entire population. Of course the
development or the extension of the range of any such insects, and any
one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us,
would readily account for the destruction of some given species or
even for the destruction of several species in a limited area of
country.
When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is
different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the
knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for
instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial
period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal
life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied
fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna
succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.
But in many other cases we cannot so much as hazard a guess at why a
given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these
inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America
towards the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had
been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very time
that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with
Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America,
some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are
recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and
armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.