CHAPTER XIV 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND THE WORLD'S FUTURE. ^ 



Every race which has deeply impressed itself on the 

 human family h^s been the representative of some great 

 idea — one or more — which has given direction to the na- 

 tion's life and form to its civilization. Among the 

 Egyptians this seminal idea was life, among the 

 Persians it was light, among the Hebrews it was 

 purity, among the Greeks it was beauty, among the 

 Romans it was law. The Anglo-Saxon is the repre- 

 sentative of two great ideas, which are closely related. 

 One of them is that of civil liberty. Nearly all of the 

 civil liberty of the world is enjoyed by Anglo-Saxons: 

 the English, the British colonists, and the people of the 

 United States. To some, like the Swiss, it is permitted 

 by the sufferance of their neighbors; others, like the 

 French, have experimented with it; but, in modern 

 times, the peoples whose love of liberty has won it, and 

 whose genius for self-government has preserved it, have 

 been Anglo-Saxons. The noblest races have always 

 been lovers of liberty. The love ran strong in early 

 German blood, and has profoundly influenced the insti- 

 tutions of all the branches of the great German family ; 

 but it was left for the Anglo-Saxon branch fully to rec- 

 ognize the right of the individual to himself, and form- 

 ally to declare it the foundation stone of government. 



The other great idea of which the Anglo-Saxon is the 

 exponent is that of a pure spiritual Christianity. It 



1 It is only just to say that the substance of this chapter was given to the 

 pubUc as a lecture some three years before the appearance of Prof. Fiske's 

 Manifest Destiny, in Harper's Magazine, for March, 1885, which contains 

 some of the same ideas. 



