434 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



them was as old as civilization. The other great motive was to 

 obtain new supplies of gold and silver, under an exaggerated 

 and fallacious notion of the desirableness of those forms of 

 wealth. Starting from these motives the movement has run its 

 own course of commerce, colonization, war, missionary enterprise, 

 economic expansion, and social evolution, for three centuries. 

 The discovery, colonization, and exploitation of the outlying con- 

 tinents have been the most important elements in modern history. 

 We Americans live in one of the great commonwealths which 

 have been created by it. We are hard at work occupying and 

 subduing one of these outlying continents, from a local and later 

 but comparatively old center of civilization. In our own history 

 we have been, first, one of the outlying communities which were 

 being exploited, and then ourselves an old civilization exploiting 

 outlying regions. 



The process of extension from Europe has gone on with the 

 majesty and necessity of a process of Nature. Nothing in human 

 history can compare with it as an unfolding of the drama of 

 human life on earth under the aspects of growth, reaction, destruc- 

 tion, new development, and higher integration. The record shows 

 that the judgments of statesmen and philosophers about this 

 process from its beginning have been a series of errors, and that 

 the policies by which they have sought to control and direct it 

 have only crippled it and interrupted it by war, revolt, and dissen- 

 sion. At the present time the process is going on under a wrangle 

 of discordant ethical judgments about its nature and the rights of 

 the parties in it. We are rebuked for the wrongs of the aborigi- 

 nes, the vices of civilization, the greed of traders, the mistakes of 

 missionaries, land-grabbing, etc., yet we Americans and others 

 are living to-day in the enjoyment of the fruits of these wrongs 

 perpetrated a few years ago. The fact is, as the history clearly 

 shows, that the extension of the higher civilization over the globe 

 is a natural process in which we are all swept along in spite of 

 our ethical judgments. Those men, civilized or uncivilized, who 

 can not or will not come into the process will be crushed under 

 it. It is as impossible that the present and future exploitation 

 of Africa should not go on as it is that the present inhabitants 

 of Manhattan Island should return to Europe and let the red man 

 come back to his rights again. The scope for reason and con- 

 science in the matter lies in taking warning from the statesmen 

 and philosophers who have been overhasty in the past with their 

 doctrines and policies of how the process must go on. 



Looking at the movement of men from Europe to the outlying 

 continents as a phenomenon in the development of private inter- 

 ests and welfare, it appears at once that the man who went out as 

 a fortune-hunter and he who went out as a colonist are on a very 



