African and European Addresses

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 Sirdar11 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.

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, sentimentality12 is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.

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 Pasha13 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.

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.

Biological Analogies in History 14

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.