PRESENT PROBLEMS 227 



The picture I have drawn of economic changes will not be com- 

 plete without a third illustration of the limits of social prediction. 

 Progress having hitherto been on race lines, tradition emphasizes 

 the idea of race supremacy. Sharp distinctions have been drawn 

 between nations and their habitats; and one's own kindred are 

 assumed to be right, while strangers and enemies are wrong. The 

 mountaineer is pronounced superior to the plainsman, the country- 

 man to the urban dweller, and the men of cold regions to those of 

 hot climates. Buckle's contrast between the emotional East and 

 the intellectual West is a Western tradition without geographic 

 truth. Just as baseless is the dictum that political stability is impos- 

 sible south of the frost-line. 



It is also claimed that civilization must be Teuton or Anglo- 

 American in racial quality, and that its environment is a narrow 

 strip of the temperate zone in North Europe and America. But 

 in fact the barriers to the expansion of civilization on which these 

 traditions rest have been swept aside. More than ever civilization 

 is economic, and far more extensive than before are the geographic 

 bases of material prosperity. The essentials of progress security, 

 food, health, capital, and mobility of men, of goods, and of thought 

 are now found in many regions outside the wheat-belt of the north 

 temperate zone, and other races than the Germanic possess the 

 combination of essentials and benefit by it. The expansion of civil- 

 ization to new places and races has begun, and will not end until 

 the level of Southern and Eastern life has been raised to that of the 

 North and West. Cuba and Porto Rico have to-day better condi- 

 tions than Virginia had two centuries ago, and in Japan is a happier 

 combination of essentials than could have been found in Elizabethan 

 England. Surely if England and Virginia could make men under 

 their conditions, Japan and Cuba can likewise attain the level of 

 our present civilization. 



Great as is the good that flows from the bettering of economic 

 conditions, a still greater springs from race assimilation and the 

 blending of traditions that succeeds economic contacts. Society is 

 perpetuated through its traditions rather than through its heredity. 

 Mobility of goods is less necessary to a general advance than is mobil- 

 ity of thought. By contact we shall raise our own ideals and gain 

 as much as the Eastern and Southern races will. Religion, morality, 

 political institutions, public law, and literature will all be revivified, 

 lifted, and freshly idealized. 



The intellectual and national awakening of the races of Southern 

 and Eastern Europe and of Japan shows the presence of a leaven 

 that will transform their static traditions into dynamic forces more 

 vivid than those of the Anglo-American. And the moral awakening 

 in England and America which demands fair play and justice for 



