covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like
some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the
dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior
in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or
later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which
she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it
could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker
than it needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which
both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed.
Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being
such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of
the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was
bad enough. But the fatal weakness was that so common in rich,
peace-loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possible,
and try to justify their own reluctance to face it either by
high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of
short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to
believe that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on
land; and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very
well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient,
as either to insure them against the peace being broken, or else to
give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to
secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in
the future.
It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position
among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the
same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position
in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burned
itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of
great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the
great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools
followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.
In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy
teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the
Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no
decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so
many countries; no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no
general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first a
flowering time, in which the country's men of action and men of
thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day;
then this period of command passed, and the State revolved in an eddy,
aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the
people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered
themselves, and play again a leading part.
In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman
went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the
gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of
contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work
throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism.
It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring
forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people
cowered in helpless misery among the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as
the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the
cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but
in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and
growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a
vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern
world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain
in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for
Italy. Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many
little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in
their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts
and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve
order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, cannot unfairly
be compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was
ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the
nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new
birth.
Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance in
certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one time
seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain or
Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of a
national type can be found than in the case of the Græco-Roman
dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
once have been. The over-shadowing and far-reaching importance of what
occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the Valley of the Po.
The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
them a new type, the Arab.
Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main
facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the
greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains
in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin
culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while it has
lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts,
save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are
other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we
do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden
causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out
before we can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean
the actual dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for
instance, astonishing how little permanent change in the physical
make-up of the people seems to have been worked in Europe by the
migrations of the races in historic times. A tall, fair-haired,
long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and establishes
a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent revolution,
no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written records to
indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a
time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of
the locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the
people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does
this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have dwindled
and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient blood, has
there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation, to the
ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair,
shape of skull, and stature, change in the new environment, so as to
be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do
the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure
of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the
ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, has the new
strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the
blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and of the
Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large populations where
the old physical type has once more become dominant? Here in England,
the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the
round barrows, have they blended, or has one or the other type
actually died out; or are they merged in some older race which they
seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue and civilization
of some later race which seemingly destroyed them? We cannot say. We
do not know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan
tongues represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan type,
nor where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its language
on other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood
accompanied the change of tongue.
The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can
and those which cannot be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence
during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of
America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the
four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating
rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The
movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has
witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over
the world, as well as an altogether unexampled advance in man's
dominion over nature; and this together with a literary and artistic
activity to be matched in but one previous epoch. This period of
extension and development has been that of one race, the so-called
white race, or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples living
in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who
profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to Greece
and Rome.
The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is
this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race. It
is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went
before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of
Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor,
had on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe.
More than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the
mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During
that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand
comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European
advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of
European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the
islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia.
Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest
is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much of it
represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the
intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the
conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law,
culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood. During
this period substantially all of the world achievements worth
remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent. The
first exception of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan
within the last generation--a phenomenon unexampled in history; for
both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of ancestral descent is
as remote as possible from ours, and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping
most of what was strongest in her ancient character and traditions,
has assimilated with curious completeness most of the characteristics
that have given power and leadership to the West.
During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples
of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead. The
movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering time was as
brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are
illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets, and
painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial
explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden
force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we cannot
lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after
centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese
stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are
other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.
About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of
the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of
Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the
Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp
leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has
at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion;
but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has
been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over
the world's waste spaces.
Comparison is often made between the Empire of Britain and the Empire
of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern
civilization, the Empire of Rome is of course the more important,
simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other
continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the
Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The Empire of Rome is the
most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be
compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the
nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the
stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the
other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely
increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older
empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years,
there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.
In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor
had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the
horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only
decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus,
she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into
which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she
overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek city
of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies
of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House
of Barca, which rendered the struggle for ever memorable. It was the
distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that
set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was
curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall
barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened
her but to die.
On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the
great Empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that
have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the
continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the
empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had
at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath,
the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and
Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The Empire of Britain
is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide variety of
possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold achievement of
every kind, than even the glorious Empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome,
Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by
conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the
very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth
or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to
tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents
with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of
alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all comers
the right to the world's waste spaces, while at home she has held her
own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome's at her
zenith.
Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own
borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers,
is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from
without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard
ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these
enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape
being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We
Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep
in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of
a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty,
of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my
hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think
me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my
theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as
little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.
But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think
soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is
the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have
a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.
No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
all-important factor in national greatness is national character.
There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever
tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an end?
Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of
death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can
tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that
can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for
good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for
vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The
most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of
natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of
the civilized nations of Central and Western Europe, of America and
Australia; a diminution so great that if it continues for the next
century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have
begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have
already gone very far backward.
There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is
much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken
than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr
hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-and
fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to
the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the
civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at
Carlyle's prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the
teeming life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and
of noble effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two
generations since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had
been told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth
doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future
remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not
altered. However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name
will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as
valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to
peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the
ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have
expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in the
end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the nations whose
only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who would risk
nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the same fate
may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with
it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the
future of mankind.
A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the
physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of
heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence
the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has
done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to
see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up the
task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. But
if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to
remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers
were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation,
from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from
the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of
this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward
and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the
man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept
alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand.
What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less
matter than how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the
realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was
of substance, then high success was really theirs.
In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between
what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of
the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the
great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the
world's surface, during the thousands of years that have elapsed since
cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the
Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of
the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the
roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the
civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times, there
are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any
conclusions for the present based on what has happened in the past.
While freely admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it
is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance
that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there
is the slightest necessary connection between any weakening of virile
force and this advance in the moral standard, this growth of the sense
of obligation to one's neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor
wrong. We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which
insists that kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of
character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of
strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted
morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we
shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend
to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character
stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity
to resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a
lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of
Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as
disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a State; and they were
also as strong men as ever founded or saved a State. Surely such
examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine
justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations
must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love
of ease which they tend to produce.