Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language. The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences were between European and American things, that the Americans make so much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing more homogeneous.” The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal--of such is our civilization. Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system? A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.