Page 271 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

252 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

radically distinct, — because the evolution of
racial characteristics radically different, — con-
front each other without the interposition of
any neutral belt, by the intervention of which
the contrasts, being more remote, are less
apparent, and within which distinctions shade
one into the other?
There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast
preponderance of numbers, and those numbers,
however incoherent now in mass, composed
of units which in their individual capacity
have in no small degree the great elements
of strength whereby man prevails over man

and the fittest survives. Deficient, apparently,
in aptitude for political and social organization,
they have failed to evolve the aggregate power
and intellectual scope of which as communi-
ties they are otherwise capable. This lesson
too they may learn, as they already have learned
from us much that they have failed themselves
to originate ; but to the lack of it is chiefly
due the inferiority of material development
under which, as compared to ourselves, they
now labor. But men do not covet less the
prosperity which they themselves cannot or
do not create, a trait wherein lies the strength