204 NATIONAL GROWTH AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 



in any other progressive nation, that in average expectation of 

 life as in stature the American leads the world, and that even in 

 this active land ten men rust out where one wears out. The 

 faint-hearted shudder at the figment of Wall street and the 

 phantom of the monopoly ; they forget that the multi-million- 

 aire's daughter becomes an angel of mercy whose beneficence 

 softens hundreds of sick-beds and lengthens scores of lives, and 

 that the best organized American monopoly founds a university 

 whence a thousand students go forth annually to diffuse higher 

 knowledge and better capacity for self-support among a hundred 

 thousand countrymen. Pessimists cower before the formless 

 monster of political corruption which they conceive to gnaw at 

 the vitals of our national institutions ; they forget that the exec- 

 utive of the state containing our so-called corrupt metropolis 

 was elected on the sole platform of honest manhood, and that 

 our present Chief Executive is one to whom, more than any 

 predecessor, the will of the people is law. Today the trembling 

 ones shrink shrieking at the self-conjured ghost of imperial- 

 ism, as if empire could grow in freedom's soil, as if the bright- 

 winged papilio of constitutional law might, forsooth, creep back 

 to the chrysalis where the monarchical pupa grew in centuries 

 past ; these do more than forget — they never knew that the cul- 

 ture-plane of constitutional control is so far above that of impe- 

 rial rule that the subject of empires can never see its inspiring 

 expanse ; they ignore the Law of Human Progress (seen through 

 the coordination of other sciences in the Science of Man) under 

 which humanity moves, in ways orderly as planetary orbits or 

 vital stages, from savagery into barbarism, thence into civiliza- 

 tion, and finally into enlightenment, never dropping backward 

 save by extinction; they comprehend not the full significance 

 of humanity's law, vaguely expressed as " manifest destin3 r ," 

 which proves that imperialism is impossible on the plane of en- 

 lightenment, and that the peoples of the earth are steadily rising 

 from plane to plane with the certainty of ultimate union on the 

 highest of the series. Would that the ever-present prophet of 

 evil might always fail of honor in his own country ! 



" Take up the White Man's burden," chants the bard of his 

 generation in the ballad of the century : 



" Take up the White Man's burden — 

 The savage wars of peace — 

 Fill full the mouth of Famine, 

 And bid the sickness cease." 



