26 The Winning of the West 



one of the leading races of mankind; but they pre- 

 ferred the immediate gains to be derived from the 

 ownership of the trade with the Spice Islands; and 

 so for the unimportant over-lordship of a few patches 

 of tropical soil, they bartered the chance of building 

 a giant Dutch Republic in the South Seas. Had 

 the Swedish successors of Gustavus Adolphus de- 

 voted their energies to colonization in America, in- 

 stead of squabbling with Slavs and Germans for one 

 or two wretched Baltic provinces, they could un- 

 doubtedly have built up in the new world a Sweden 

 tenfold greater than that in the old. If France had 

 sent to her possessions in America as many colo- 

 nists as she sent soldiers to war for petty townships 

 in Germany and Italy, the French would now be 

 masters of half the territory north of the Rio Grande. 

 England alone, because of a combination of causes, 

 was able to use aright the chances given her for the 

 conquest and settlement of the world's waste spaces ; 

 and in consequence the English-speaking peoples 

 now have before them a future more important than 

 that of all the continental European peoples com- 

 bined. 



It is natural that most nations should be thus 

 blind to the possibilities of the future. Few indeed 

 are the men who can look a score of years into the 

 future, and fewer still those who will make great 

 sacrifices for the real, not the fancied, good of their 

 children's children ; but in questions of race suprem- 

 acy the look-ahead should be for centuries rather 

 than decades, and the self-sacrifice of the individual 



