24 The Winning of the West 



the blood and sweat, the craft and cunning and blind 

 luck, the raw cruelty and stupidity, the shortcom- 

 ings of heart and hand, the mad abuse of victory. 

 Strands of meanness and cowardice are everywhere 

 shot through the warp of lofty and generous daring. 

 There are failures bitter and shameful side by side 

 with feats of triumphant prowess. Of those who 

 venture in the contest some achieve success; others 

 strive feebly and fail ignobly. 



If a race is weak, if it is lacking in the physical 

 and moral traits which go to the makeup of a con- 

 quering people, it can not succeed. For three hun- 

 dred years the Portuguese possessed footholds in 

 South Africa ; but they left to the English and Dutch 

 the task of building free communities able to hold 

 in fact as well as in name the country south of the 

 Zambesi.. Temperate South America is as fertile 

 and healthy for the white man as temperate North 

 America, and is so much less in extent as to offer 

 a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; 

 yet the Spaniard, who came to the Plata two cen- 

 turies before the American backwoodsman reached 

 the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in 

 a decade as his Northern rival did in a year. 



The task must be given the race just at the time 

 when it is ready for the undertaking. The whole 

 future of the world would have been changed had 

 the period of trans-oceanic expansion among the 

 nations of Europe begun at a time when the Scandi- 

 navians or Germans were foremost in sea-trade and 

 sea-war; if it had begun when the fleets of the 



