the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and
business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to
remember that though hardness of heart is a great evil it is no
greater an evil than softness of head.
But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of
all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern
nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded,
that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien
races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong
to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has
ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying on a scale hitherto
unexampled to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the
people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great
Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve,
and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the
man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and
the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our
own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the
barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that
arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They cannot be solved
by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little
patent recipes, and those cut-and-dried theories of the political
nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of
elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of
the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier of civilization,
adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with other men,
and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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