St. Clair and Wayne 27 



must be for the good not of the next generation but 

 perchance of the fourth or fifth in line of descent. 

 The Frenchman and the Hollander of the seven- 

 teenth century could not even dimly see the possibili- 

 ties that loomed vast and vague in the colonization 

 of America and Australia ; they did not have, and it 

 was hardly possible that they should have, the re- 

 motest idea that it would be well for them to surren- 

 der, one the glory gained by his German conquests, 

 the other the riches reaped from his East Indian 

 trade, in order that three hundred years later huge 

 unknown continents should be filled with French 

 and Dutch commonwealths. No nation, taken as a 

 whole, can ever see so far into the future ; no nation, 

 even if it could see such a future, would ever sacri- 

 fice so much to win it. Hitherto each race in turn 

 has expanded only because the interests of a certain 

 number of individuals of many succeeding genera- 

 tions have made them active and vigorous agents in 

 the work of expansion. 



This indifference on the part of individuals to the 

 growth of the race is often nearly as marked in new 

 as in old communities, although the very existence 

 of these new communities depends upon that growth. 

 It is strange to see how the new settlers in the new 

 land tend to turn their faces, not toward the world 

 before them, but toward the world they have left 

 behind. Many of them, perhaps, wish rather to 

 take parts in the struggles of the old civilized pow- 

 ers, than to do their share in laying the obscure but 

 gigantic foundations of the empires of the future. 



