find ample scope. This division gives no ground for quarrel; the
Russians have never had much capacity for emigration in the English
sense, and the English are beginning to learn by bitter experience that
they are not suited for the mission of civilizing Asia; the Spanish
races have, as a field for their renascence, now so rapidly taking
place, nearly the whole of the rich continent of South America; while
those slow, yet tenacious and admirable colonists, the Germans, will
be able to gain ground in that African continent to which they are
most attracted, and which was long ago claimed by the Dutch for this
division of the Teutonic race. If we English are certain to make little
progress where, as in Asia, the great task is conciliation, when it is
a question of stamping out a lower race--then is our time! It has to
be done; it is quite clear that the fragile Red men of America and the
strange wild Blacks of Australia must perish at the touch of the White
man. On the whole we stamp them out as mercifully as may be, supplying
our victims liberally with missionaries and blankets.
It is the English race, not England, that is thus possessing so large
a part of the earth. And it is interesting to observe that both the
races--almost the latest of the great European nations to emerge from
barbarism--that now promise to dominate the world are by temperament
disinclined for monarchic government. With the Russians their despotic
Empire has been an exotic which they may have worshipped at a distance,
but which, except as a symbol of the ideal, has had little influence
on their lives. We can only determine the institutions that will
develop healthfully in a country by a careful and patient study of that
nation’s origin. Why is the parliamentary system a dubious success in
France, and the jury an acknowledged failure in Italy? One watches
anxiously to see whether Russia will find the methods of national
progress in the brilliant but fatal examples of a foreign Western
civilization or in the fundamental instincts of its own race. The
English have always been impatient of kings and governors, and have
taken every opportunity to establish republican government. We see this
in the United States. In Australia the race is developing its most
intensely democratic instincts, and the Australians will certainly not
tolerate any attempt to draw them closer to any country outside their
own land. England has, during the present century, owing to special
conditions, occupied a position in the world enormously disproportioned
to its size. These special conditions are now rapidly ceasing; the Suez
Canal, which has dealt so decisive a blow to the commercial greatness
of England, has made it more difficult than ever for us to maintain the
artificial position of advantage which we possessed as distributors; so
that England, as a distributing power, is being reduced by the failure
of the Cape route to the same condition as Venice was reduced to by its
discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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