Page 262 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

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A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 243

which they should admit, in modifying and
shaping their policies, before these have be-
come hardened into fixed lines, directive for
many years of the future welfare of their
people ?
To all these questions the writer, as one of
the departing generation, would answer yes
but it is to the last that his attention, possibly by
constitutional bias, is more naturally directed.
It appears to him that in the ebb and flow of
human affairs, under those mysterious im-
pulses the origin of which is sought by some
in a personal Providence, by some in laws not
yet fully understood, we stand at the opening
of a period when the question is to be settled
decisively, though the issue may be long de-
layed, whether Eastern or Western civilization
is to dominate throughout the earth and to
control its future. The great task now before
the world of civilized Christianity, its great
mission, which it must fulfil or perish, is to
receive into its own bosom and raise to its own
ideals those ancient and different civilizations
by which it is surrounded and outnumbered,
the civilizations at the head of which stand
China, India, and Japan. This, to cite the