Biological analogies in historyRoosevelt, Theodore
Philosophy
Biological analogies in history
Roosevelt, Theodore
History -- Philosophy
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long
established, highly developed and specialized nation. In this case the
nation is usually spoken of as a ‘young,’ and is correctly spoken of
as a ‘new,’ nation; but the term should always be used with a clear
sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and
what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation
just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities
compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in
every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city.
So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with
England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and culture
is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean for a
moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that the
old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use
the phrase ‘a new people,’ in speaking of Canadians or Australians,
Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense
from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those
founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of
astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves
conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily and the British Islands; we use
it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod,
and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests
struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities
and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred
were ‘new,’ compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also
in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing
in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the
Caesars of Byzantium; their social problems and aftertime history were
totally different. This is not true of those ‘new’ nations which spring
direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States,
are all ‘new’ nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with
whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of
the general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England.
The differences between these ‘new’ American and these ‘old’ European
nations are not as great as those which separate the ‘new’ nations one
from another, and the ‘old’ nations one from another. There are in
each case very real differences between the new and the old nation;
differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the
same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization,
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