The Winning of the West, Volume Four | Page 3

seas, and that built up in alien
continents vast commonwealths with the law, the language, the creed,
and the culture, no less than the blood, of the parent stocks, were those
that during the centuries of expansion, possessed power on the
ocean,--Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and, above all, England.
Interest of the Race and the Individual Opposed.
Even a strong race, in its prime, and given the task at the right moment,
usually fails to perform it; for at the moment the immense importance
of the opportunity is hardly ever understood, while the selfish interests
of the individual and the generation are opposed to the interest of the
race as a whole. Only the most far-seeing and high-minded statesmen
can grasp the real weight, from the race-standpoint, of the possibilities
which to the men of their day seem so trivial. The conquest and
settlement rarely take place save under seldom-occurring conditions
which happen to bring about identity of interest between the individual
and the race. Dutch seamen knew the coasts of Australia and New

Zealand generations before they were settled by the English, and had
the people of Holland willed to take possession of them, the Dutch
would now be one of the leading races of mankind; but they preferred
the immediate gains to be derived from the ownership of the trade with
the Spice Islands; and so for the unimportant over-lordship of a few
patches of tropical soil, they bartered the chance of building a giant
Dutch Republic in the South Seas. Had the Swedish successors of
Gustavus Adolphus devoted their energies to colonization in America,
instead of squabbling with Slavs and Germans for one or two wretched
Baltic provinces, they could undoubtedly have built up in the new
world a Sweden tenfold greater than that in the old. If France had sent
to her possessions in America as many colonists as she sent soldiers to
war for petty townships in Germany and Italy, the French would now
be masters of half the territory north of the Rio Grande. England alone,
because of a combination of causes, was able to use aright the chances
given her for the conquest and settlement of the world's waste spaces;
and in consequence the English-speaking peoples now have before
them a future more important than that of all the continental European
peoples combined.
Each Race Indifferent to its Own Future.
It is natural that most nations should be thus blind to the possibilities of
the future. Few indeed are the men who can look a score of years into
the future, and fewer still those who will make great sacrifices for the
real, not the fancied, good of their children's children; but in questions
of race supremacy the look-ahead should be for centuries rather than
decades, and the self-sacrifice of the individual 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 seventeenth century
could not even dimly see the possibilities 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 remotest idea that it
would be well for them to surrender, 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 sacrifice 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 generations have made them
active and vigorous agents in the work of expansion.
This Indifference as Marked in New as in Old Communities.
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 now the new settlers in the new land tend to turn their
faces, not towards the world before them, but towards the world they
have left behind. Many of them, perhaps most, wish rather to take parts
in the struggles of the old civilized powers, than to do their share in
laying the obscure but gigantic foundations of the empires of the future.
The New Englander who was not personally interested in the lands
beyond the Alleghanies often felt indifferent or hostile to the growth of
the trans-montane America; and in their turn these over-mountain men,
these Kentuckians and Tennesseans, were concerned to obtain a port at