No nation has a right to remain in the backwoods (pardon the homely expression). The facilities for travel and inter-communication are so vastly improved the “double coincidence of wants and possessions” has become so general, the bar of language, custom, religion and race is so rapidly disappearing—in a word, the nations of the earth are becoming such near neighbors to each other that each must be personally interested, so to speak, in the welfare of the others. If a man’s nearest neighbors are some miles distant, the way they get their living or govern their households may be of small interest to him; but let them move up to adjoining lots and it makes a world of difference whether their business is reputable, and whether their households are quiet and orderly. No nation is safe when it remains in the backwoods. When two races, a more civilized and a less civilized, come into close quarters as neighbors the latter must improve or go to the wall. And this is not so much a moral as it is a physical question; for an area of land that will support one hunter will support a hundred farmers, and nature is economic in this as in every other matter. It is not so much that the weak must yield to the strong as it is that the ineffectual must give way to the effectual—just the ordinary law of evolution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: “No Nation has a right to remain in the backwoods” See page 169. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Like all natural laws it is merciless; and being a natural law it is neither to be condemned nor justified; yet again, like other natural laws, its rigor may and should be mitigated. In short, the superior race should regard the inferior much as a schoolmaster does an intractable youth, who must be dealt with kindly and patiently, admonished repeatedly and perhaps punished severely. No nation has a right to remain in the backwoods. A country that shuts its eyes to progress in other lands, a people whose all-sufficient answer is, “What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us”, a nation which stands for tyranny, for corruption, for instability, for retrogression, of any sort, has no one to blame but itself when the widening breach which separates it from advancing civilization is closed with a violence that destroys its identity. [Illustration: A MENACE.]