Chapter V: Part 5

There are exceptional cases, of course, where there is a man who can do just one thing, such as a man who can play a dozen games of chess or juggle with four rows of figures at once--and as a rule he can do nothing else. A man of this type can do nothing unless in the one crisis for which his powers fit him. But normally the man who makes the great success when the emergency arises is the man who would have made a fair success in any event. I believe that the man who is really happy in a great position--in what we call a career--is the man who would also be happy and regard his life as successful if he had never been thrown into that position. If a man lives a decent life and does his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and attached to him are better for his having lived, then he is a success, and he deserves to feel that he has done his duty and he deserves to be treated by those who have had greater success as nevertheless having shown the fundamental qualities that entitle him to respect. We have in the United States an organization composed of the men who forty-five years ago fought to a finish the great Civil War. One thing that has always appealed to me in that organization is that all of the men admitted are on a perfect equality provided the records show that their duty was well done. Whether a man served as a lieutenant-general or an eighteen-year-old recruit, so long as he was able to serve for six months and did his duty in his appointed place, then he is called Comrade and stands on an exact equality with the other men. The same principle should shape our associations in ordinary civil life.

I am not speaking cant to you. I remember once sitting at a table with six or eight other public officials, and each was explaining* how he regarded being in public life, how only the sternest sense of duty prevented him from resigning his office, and how the strain of working for a thankless constituency was telling upon him, and nothing but the fact that he felt he ought to sacrifice his comfort to the welfare of his country kept him in the arduous life of statesmanship. It went round the table until it came to my turn. This was during my first term of office as President of the United States. I said: "Now, gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any misunderstanding. I like my job, and I want to keep it for four years longer." (Loud laughter and applause.) I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did. Moreover, I don't think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself more. I have enjoyed my life and my work because I thoroughly believe that success--the real success--does not depend upon the position you hold, but upon how you carry yourself in that position. There is no man here to-day who has not the chance so to shape his life after he leaves this university that he shall have the right to feel, when his life ends, that he has made a real success of it; and his making a real success of it does not in the least depend upon the prominence of the position he holds. Gentlemen, I thank you, and I am glad I have violated the poet's hope and have preached to you.

*Transcriber's Note: Original "explaning"

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BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA

Address Delivered at the Guildhall, London, May 31, 1910[11]

[11] The occasion of this address was the ceremony in the
Guildhall in which Mr. Roosevelt was presented by the Corporation
of the City of London (the oldest corporation in the world), with
the Freedom of the City. Sir Joseph Dimsdale, on behalf of the
Lord Mayor and the Corporation, made the address of
presentation.--L.F.A.

It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be here. And yet I cannot but appreciate, as we all do, the sadness of the fact that I come here just after the death of the Sovereign whom you so mourn, and whose death caused such an outburst of sympathy for you throughout the civilized world. One of the things I shall never forget is the attitude of that great mass of people, assembled on the day of the funeral, who in silence, in perfect order, and with uncovered heads, saw the body of the dead King pass to its last resting-place. I had the high honor of being deputed to come to the funeral as the representative of America, and by my presence to express the deep and universal feeling of sympathy which moves the entire American people for the British people in their hour of sadness and trial.

I need hardly say how profoundly I feel the high honor that you confer upon me; an honor great in itself, and great because of the ancient historic associations connected with it, with the ceremonies incident to conferring it, and with the place in which it is conferred. I am very deeply appreciative of all that this ceremony means, all that this gift implies, and all the kind words which Sir Joseph Dimsdale has used in conferring it. I thank you heartily for myself. I thank you still more because I know that what you have done is to be taken primarily as a sign of the respect and friendly good-will which more and more, as time goes by, tends to knit together the English-speaking peoples.

I shall not try to make you any extended address of mere thanks, still less of mere eulogy. I prefer to speak, and I know you would prefer to have me speak, on matters of real concern to you, as to which I happen at this moment to possess some first-hand knowledge; for recently I traversed certain portions of the British Empire under conditions which made me intimately cognizant of their circumstances and needs. I have just spent nearly a year in Africa. While there I saw four British protectorates. I grew heartily to respect the men whom I there met, settlers and military and civil officials; and it seems to me that the best service I can render them and you is very briefly to tell you how I was impressed by some of the things that I saw. Your men in Africa are doing a great work for your Empire, and they are also doing a great work for civilization. This fact and my sympathy for and belief in them are my reasons for speaking. The people at home, whether in Europe or in America, who live softly, often fail fully to realize what is being done for them by the men who are actually engaged in the pioneer work of civilization abroad. Of course, in any mass of men there are sure to be some who are weak or unworthy, and even those who are good are sure to make occasional mistakes--that is as true of pioneers as of other men. Nevertheless, the great fact in world history during the last century has been the spread of civilization over the world's waste spaces. The work is still going on; and the soldiers, the settlers, and the civic officials who are actually doing it are, as a whole, entitled to the heartiest respect and the fullest support from their brothers who remain at home.

At the outset, there is one point upon which I wish to insist with all possible emphasis. The civilized nations who are conquering for civilization savage lands should work together in a spirit of hearty mutual good-will. I listened with special interest to what Sir Joseph Dimsdale said about the blessing of peace and good-will among nations. I agree with that in the abstract. Let us show by our actions and our words in specific cases that we agree with it also in the concrete. Ill-will between civilized nations is bad enough anywhere, but it is peculiarly harmful and contemptible when those actuated by it are engaged in the same task, a task of such far-reaching importance to the future of humanity, the task of subduing the savagery of wild man and wild nature, and of bringing abreast of our civilization those lands where there is an older civilization which has somehow gone crooked. Mankind as a whole has benefited by the noteworthy success that has attended the French occupation of Algiers and Tunis, just as mankind as a whole has benefited by what England has done in India; and each nation should be glad of the other nation's achievements. In the same way, it is of interest to all civilized men that a similar success shall attend alike the Englishman and the German as they work in East Africa; exactly as it has been a benefit to every one that America took possession of the Philippines. Those of you who know Lord Cromer's excellent book in which he compares modern and ancient imperialism need no words from me to prove that the dominion of modern civilized nations over the dark places of the earth has been fraught with widespread good for mankind; and my plea is that the civilized nations engaged in doing this work shall treat one another with respect and friendship, and shall hold it as discreditable to permit envy and jealousy, backbiting and antagonism among themselves. I visited four different British protectorates or possessions in Africa--namely, East Africa, Uganda, the Sudan, and Egypt. About the first three, I have nothing to say to you save what is pleasant, as well as true. About the last, I wish to say a few words because they are true, without regard to whether or not they are pleasant.

In the highlands of East Africa you have a land which can be made a true white man's country. While there I met many settlers on intimate terms, and I felt for them a peculiar sympathy, because they so strikingly reminded me of the men of our own western frontier of America, of the pioneer farmers and ranch-men who built up the States of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. It is of high importance to encourage these settlers in every way, remembering--I say that here in the City--remembering that the prime need is not for capitalists to exploit the land, but for settlers who shall make their permanent homes therein. Capital is a good servant, but a mighty poor master. No alien race should be permitted to come into competition with the settlers. Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir Percy Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the needs of the country, and is zealously devoted to its interests. All that is necessary is to follow his lead, and to give him cordial support and backing. The principle upon which I think it is wise to act in dealing with far-away possessions is this--choose your man, change him if you become discontented with him, but while you keep him back him up.

In Uganda the problem is totally different. Uganda cannot be made a white man's country, and the prime need is to administer the land in the interest of the native races, and to help forward their development. Uganda has been the scene of an extraordinary development of Christianity. Nowhere else of recent times has missionary effort met with such success; the inhabitants stand far above most of the races in the Dark Continent in their capacity for progress towards civilization. They have made great strides, and the English officials have shown equal judgment and disinterestedness in the work they have done; and they have been especially wise in trying to develop the natives along their own lines, instead of seeking to turn them into imitation or make-believe Englishmen. In Uganda all that is necessary is to go forward on the paths you have already marked out.

The Sudan is peculiarly interesting because it affords the best possible example of the wisdom--and when I say that I speak with historical accuracy--of disregarding the well-meaning but unwise sentimentalists who object to the spread of civilization at the expense of savagery. I remember a quarter of a century ago when you were engaged in the occupation of the Sudan that many of your people at home and some of ours in America said that what was demanded in the Sudan was the application of the principles of independence and self-government to the Sudanese, coupled with insistence upon complete religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade. Unfortunately, the chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence and self-government was that they could put down all religions but their own and carry on the slave trade. I do not believe that in the whole world there is to be found any nook of territory which has shown such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity as the Sudan has shown during the last twelve years while it has been under British rule. Up to that time it was independent, and it governed itself; and independence and self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack. Great crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half, while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the method of obtaining each.

During those fifteen years at least two-thirds of the population, probably seven or eight millions of people, died by violence or by starvation. Then the English came in; put an end to the independence and self-government which had wrought this hideous evil; restored order, kept the peace, and gave to each individual a liberty which, during the evil days of their own self-government, not one human being possessed, save only the blood-stained tyrant who at the moment was ruler. I stopped at village after village in the Sudan, and in many of them I was struck by the fact that, while there were plenty of children, they were all under twelve years old; and inquiry always developed that these children were known as "Government children," because in the days of Mahdism it was the literal truth that in a very large proportion of the communities every child was either killed or died of starvation and hardship, whereas under the peace brought by English rule families are flourishing, men and women are no longer hunted to death, and the children are brought up under more favorable circumstances, for soul and body, than have ever previously obtained in the entire history of the Sudan. In administration, in education, in police work, the Sirdar[12] and his lieutenants, great and small, have performed to perfection a task equally important and difficult. The Government officials, civil and military, who are responsible for this task, and the Egyptian and Sudanese who have worked with and under them, and as directed by them, have a claim upon all civilized mankind which should be heartily admitted. It would be a crime not to go on with the work, a work which the inhabitants themselves are helpless to perform, unless under firm and wise guidance from outside. I have met people who had some doubt as to whether the Sudan would pay. Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my judgment, this fact does not alter the duty of England to stay there. It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation is willing when the necessity arises to undertake a big task. I feel about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task, there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether it would pay. I always answered that it was one of the great world works which had to be done; that it was our business as a nation to do it, if we were ready to make good our claim to be treated as a great world Power; and that as we were unwilling to abandon the claim, no American worth his salt ought to hesitate about performing the task. I feel just the same way about you in the Sudan.

[12] Sir Reginald Wingate, who at the time of this address was
both Sirdar of the Anglo-Egyptian Army and Governor-General of the
Sudan.--L.F.A.

Now as to Egypt. It would not be worth my while to speak to you at all, nor would it be worth your while to listen, unless on condition that I say what I deeply feel ought to be said. I speak as an outsider, but in one way this is an advantage, for I speak without national prejudice. I would not talk to you about your own internal affairs here at home; but you are so very busy at home that I am not sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least, abroad. At any rate, it can do you no harm to hear the view of one who has actually been on the ground, and has information at first hand; of one, moreover, who, it is true, is a sincere well-wisher of the British Empire, but who is not English by blood, and who is impelled to speak mainly because of his deep concern in the welfare of mankind and in the future of civilization. Remember also that I who address you am not only an American, but a Radical, a real--not a mock--democrat, and that what I have to say is spoken chiefly because I am a democrat, a man who feels that his first thought is bound to be the welfare of the masses of mankind, and his first duty to war against violence and injustice and wrong-doing, wherever found; and I advise you only in accordance with the principles on which I have myself acted as American President in dealing with the Philippines.

In Egypt you are not only the guardians of your own interests; you are also the guardians of the interests of civilization; and the present condition of affairs in Egypt is a grave menace to both your Empire and the entire civilized world. You have given Egypt the best government it has had for at least two thousand years--probably a better government than it has ever had before; for never in history has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy, under a rule as free from corruption and brutality, as during the last twenty-eight years. Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have erred; and it is for you to make good your error. It has been an error proceeding from the effort to do too much and not too little in the interests of the Egyptians themselves; but unfortunately it is necessary for all of us who have to do with uncivilized peoples, and especially with fanatical peoples, to remember that in such a situation as yours in Egypt weakness, timidity, and sentimentality may cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds, sentimentality[13] is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.

[13] In the Introduction will be found Mr. Roosevelt's
differentiation of sentimentality from sentiment.--L.F.A.

In Egypt you have been treating all religions with studied fairness and impartiality; and instead of gratefully acknowledging this, a noisy section of the native population takes advantage of what your good treatment has done to bring about an anti-foreign movement, a movement in which, as events have shown, murder on a large or a small scale is expected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha[14] was the best and most competent Egyptian official, a steadfast upholder of English rule, and an earnest worker for the welfare of his countrymen; and he was murdered simply and solely because of these facts, and because he did his duty wisely, fearlessly, and uprightly. The attitude of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist Party in connection with this murder has shown that they were neither desirous nor capable of guaranteeing even that primary justice the failure to supply which makes self-government not merely an empty but a noxious farce. Such are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to help the Egyptians towards self-government is taken advantage of by them, not to make things better, not to help their country, but to try to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.

[14] Compare the address at the University of Cairo.--L.F.A.

It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not; either it is or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name agree and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the responsibility which is yours. It is the thing, not the form, which is vital; if the present forms of government in Egypt, established by you in the hope that they would help the Egyptians upward, merely serve to provoke and permit disorder, then it is for you to alter the forms; for if you stay in Egypt it is your first duty to keep order, and above all things also to punish murder and to bring to justice all who directly or indirectly incite others to commit murder or condone the crime when it is committed. When a people treats assassination as the corner-stone of self-government, it forfeits all right to be treated as worthy of self-government. You are in Egypt for several purposes, and among them one of the greatest is the benefit of the Egyptian people. You saved them from ruin by coming in, and at the present moment, if they are not governed from outside, they will again sink into a welter of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I hope and believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation.

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BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[15]

[15] The text of this Lecture, which is the Romanes Lecture for
1910, is included in the present volume under the courteous
permission of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Oxford.--L.F.A.

Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910

An American who in response to such an invitation as I have received speaks in this University of ancient renown, cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body.

More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the creative forces "swathed their too-much power," down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.

It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions--for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.

Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative worth and inter-relationship are just as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville's place is in both history and literature; no minute study of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.

Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin. Of course there is no exact parallelism between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.

How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the interpretation of human history, we cannot at present say. The historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first; but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.

Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.

Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him, we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day. Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate explanation.

Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species we must remember that such expressions as "a new species," or as "a species becoming extinct," are each commonly and indiscriminately used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course the "new" species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared later on the globe's surface than those of any old species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations, through æons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a "new" species is that from some cause, or set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that while in one form of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from the ancestral type and a new species appears.

Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term which has two entirely different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced. Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case it changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the small three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same period of the world's history, back in the middle of the mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared and that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.

The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization, triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking types, of the preceding era.

When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide one period of palæontological history from another, we can sometimes assign causes, and again we cannot even guess at them. In the case of single species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge herbivores with a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and domestic, cannot live because of the presence either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the closely-related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being the cause of the "sleeping sickness" which in many large districts has killed out the entire population. Of course the development or the extension of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us, would readily account for the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction of several species in a limited area of country.

When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.

But in many other cases we cannot so much as hazard a guess at why a given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America towards the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar during his career on this earth.

Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land between this old South American island and North America, near what is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had attained their development in the fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over the continent, but it was also changed through the development wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out. Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South America soon became populated with various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes and some of them of giant size, all of these being descended from the immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up large autochthonous [TR: original autochthonus] ungulates, giant ground sloths well-nigh as large as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge size or odd type, and because of the terrific prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South America, and flourished for a period which human history would call very long indeed, but which geologically was short.

Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north. Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America, though still retaining its connection with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was widespread and extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any cause which would account for the extinction of so many species of huge or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and there medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.

Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we use each of the words "birth" and "death," "youth" and "age," often very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing as an "old" or a "young" nation, any more than there is an "old" or "young" family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must be of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for every group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All that can properly be meant by the terms "new" and "young" is that in a given line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid change. This change may arise either from a new development or transformation of the old elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with other and varied elements; so that the words "new" nation or "young" nation may have a real difference of significance in one case from what they have in another.

As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing, generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for instance, in Western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be called "new" or "young" states in the sense that part or all of the people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on the career of civilized communities. In the southern part of Western Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors; though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.

Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case the nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is correctly spoken of as a "new," nation; but the term should always be used with a clear sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of Canadians or Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not true of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all "new" nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences between these "new" American and these "old" European nations are not as great as those which separate the "new" nations one from another, and the "old" nations one from another. There are in each case very real differences between the new and the old nation; differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples struggling from barbarism into civilization.

So, when we speak of the "death" of a tribe, a nation, or a civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared. Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed into something absolutely different from what they were. In the United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes, are in process of absorption into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two Senators, and three of the five Representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.