How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that knowledge--virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance, unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character, to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas, form an inseparable part. It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by pointing to the facts of the world as we know it--to the existing colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit that it was; just as the exponents of _laissez-faire_ were slow to admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed, is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer remarks,[57]