DS 
 
 515 
 
 
 THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW 
 
 By benjamin IDE WHEELER 
 
 [N ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES 
 
 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 
 
 JUNE 30, 1898 
 
 Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1898 
 
 Copyright, 1898, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
Class __=2S^I5 
 
 Book j/f'-H-^ 
 
 Copyright ]^° , 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr 
 

 % 
 
 $ -^ 
 
 THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW. 
 
 At a French dinner-table, a few years 
 ago, I found myself opposite a genial 
 English clergyman who was somewhat 
 disturbed by the local tendency to quote 
 values and spaces in terms of francs and 
 centimes, metres and centimetres, instead 
 of in the old-established and well -ap- 
 proved pounds, shillings, and pence, feet 
 and inches. Some attempt was made to 
 interest him in the practical convenience 
 of the decimal system, and he gave po- 
 lite and patient hearing ; but the seed 
 fell upon stony ground, where was no 
 deepness of earth, and its first fair pro- 
 mise soon withered away before an ap- 
 peal to the common consciousness of 
 man. " I think," said the Englishman, 
 addressing his international audience, 
 " everybody will have noticed that when 
 one has small sums to pay, francs and 
 centimes or dollars and cents do well 
 enough ; but if any large sum is involved, 
 one is always forced, in order really to 
 appreciate the amount, to reduce it to 
 pounds, shillings, and pence." 
 
 Socrates, in the Phsedo, compares the 
 people of his day, who thought their 
 world about the ^gean to be the whole, 
 to ants and frogs about a marshy pool. 
 The ants and the frogs we have ever 
 with us. They are antiquarians of Co- 
 penhagen to whom Danish history is the 
 history of the world. They are the 
 school committee men who insist that 
 Kansas schools should teach only Kan- 
 sas history and Kansas geography and 
 Kansas weather. They are the political 
 historians who make the world start 
 
 afresh with the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence. They are the financial experts 
 who ignore the existence of international 
 values. They are the three wise men 
 of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl. 
 All those who do not know that the ex- 
 perience of the race is one continuous 
 whole, in which dates and boundaries are 
 only guide-posts, and not barriers, are 
 the ants and frogs of Socrates. With- 
 out life perspective and historical per- 
 spective there can be no sound political 
 judgment, — least of all in these days, 
 when mighty world forces are twirhng 
 the millstones of the gods, and the gar- 
 nerings of the ages are pouring into the 
 hopper. 
 
 We are living in great times. Forces 
 that have been silently at work for cen- 
 turies are just finding their expression. 
 The closing years of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury are engaged in a process of histori- 
 cal liqu^idation by which the debtors and 
 creditors of the ages are coming to their 
 due. Scarcely have the echoes of the 
 last contest died away on the shores of 
 the Mgesm, where has been the battle- 
 ground and ultimate clearing-house of 
 old world issues, when the new world 
 issues take their shape and choose their 
 battle-ground by the Chinese Ocean. 
 Through the trans-Siberian railway Rus- 
 sia this year finds for the first time an 
 outlet to the open sea, and enters the 
 lists foi* the empire of the world. The 
 bayonets which in the seventies estab- 
 lished a German Empire are now, under 
 cover of an understanding with Russia, 
 
The Old World in the New. 
 
 ■VI ^i 
 
 opening a way for German small wares 
 in a conquest whose menace is toward 
 England. Ill-mated France shares with 
 Russia and Germany their policy of re- 
 stricted colonial markets, and toys with 
 colonizing schemes for which she has 
 more money and ambition than men. 
 The worn-out states and peoples of the 
 old world are passing through bank- 
 ruptcy. Africa is being rapidly appor- 
 tioned as spoil. The English Empire, in 
 consciousness of isolation and peril, 
 draws its own bonds closer, and awakes 
 to tardy recognition of its Western kins- 
 men, of their strength and of their kin- 
 ship of purpose. The United States of 
 America find themselves forced, whe- 
 ther they will or not, to transmute their 
 policy of resisting intrusion into one of 
 assuming the positive responsibilities of 
 a moral hegemony in the West. With- 
 in three years the entire strategic map 
 of international politics has been made 
 anew. Alsace-Lorraine and Constanti- 
 nople no longer represent the burning 
 questions of diplomacy. New issues and 
 vastly larger fields of action have been 
 opened. Three years ago, we felt that 
 our own international issues, so far as 
 they existed, had little relation to the 
 great world's worry. To-day, we are, 
 for good or bad, in the midst of it all. 
 
 Intercommunication and rapid transit 
 have been steadily drawing the ends of 
 the earth together. Silent, mighty forces 
 have long been assembling to the melt- 
 ing-pot the stubborn forms and patterns 
 of the older world. Suddenly the fire 
 is lighted. 
 
 Lord Rosebery, while Premier of Eng- 
 land, made in Parliament the following 
 statement : " We have hitherto been fa- 
 vored with one Eastern Question, which 
 we have always endeavored to lull as 
 something too portentous for our imagi- 
 nation ; but of late a Far Eastern Ques- 
 tion has been superadded, which, I con- 
 fess, to my apprehension is in the dim 
 vistas of futurity infinitely graver than 
 even that question of which we have hith- 
 
 erto known." Four years are not past, 
 and " the dim vistas of futurity " have 
 become the arena of the present, and the 
 Far Eastern Question is at the doors of 
 England and at our own. It is a ques- 
 tion in which all the world is involved. 
 The centre of disturbance may be now 
 in China, now in Cuba, now in the Phil- 
 ij^pines, but the disturbances are all in 
 sympathy. It is a question in which the 
 whole history of our race is involved. 
 Its tangled movements viewed simply 
 in their shifting surface phases yield, 
 however, no intelligible statement. They 
 concern too vast an area, too long a tra- 
 dition ; they cannot be understood from 
 the levels of the present. One must seek 
 high ground, for they tell their meaning, 
 they betray the outlines of their plot, only 
 in terms of the world labor, — the drama 
 of the history of the race. For great 
 areas and mighty upheavals the geologist 
 must run the gamut from Archaean and 
 Cambrian to Pleistocene. To-day, in a 
 sense that never before was true, the old, 
 the oldest world of man is sole compe- 
 tent interpreter of the new. 
 
 When in the year 326 b. c. Alexan- 
 der the Great stayed his eastward march 
 in northwestern India at the Sutlej, and 
 turned his course down the Indus to seek 
 the sea, a boundary line was fixed and 
 set which proved to mean for the history 
 of the human race more than any ever 
 created by the act of man. The eastern 
 boundary of Alexander's empire, running 
 from the Jaxartes River, a tributary of 
 the Sea of Aral, southward along the 
 Pamir ranges, " the roof of the world," 
 to the Indus, and then on to the Indian 
 Ocean, divided the world and its history 
 into two utterly distinct parts. 
 
 The portion which lay to the east with 
 its two great centres, India and China, 
 and which to-day includes a little over 
 half the jjopulation of the globe, had no 
 lot nor share in the life and history of 
 the western part, which we may call our 
 Nearer World. In the long process of 
 mixture and fermentation which history 
 
The Old World in the New. 
 
 has suffered since Alexander's time, all 
 the elements within this Nearer World, 
 stretching from Afghanistan and Persia 
 to the shores of western Europe, have 
 yielded their contribution, small or great, 
 to the civilization upon which our mod- 
 ern life is based. The history which 
 we study, whether of events, institutions, 
 ideas, or religions, has all been a history 
 of this Nearer World. 
 
 India and China went their own way. 
 The Nearer World knew little of them, 
 gave little to them, received little from 
 them, until after the discovery of the 
 route around the Cape of Good Hope. 
 The intercourse opened by that narrow 
 way is, in the twentieth century, to tread 
 the three broad highways of the Suez 
 Canal, the trans - Siberian railway, the 
 Pacific route, which represent, respective- 
 ly, England, Russia, America. England, 
 by the Canadian Pacific, shares the Pa- 
 cific route, and she must soon open an- 
 other by rail from the Mediterranean to 
 the head of the Persian Gulf. 
 
 Alexander's boundary was not a boun- 
 dary of race. It ran across the bands 
 of blood; A section of the Aryan race, 
 isolated behind its barriers, became the 
 dominant caste and the rulers of India, 
 and developed or administered there a 
 form of life and thought utterly distinct 
 from any other product of the Aryan tem- 
 per. It was a boundary set in the his- 
 toric life of man. How real it was the 
 distribution of the great religious faiths 
 of the world will tell. Political institu- 
 tions and boundaries fade and shift ; no- 
 thing human yields so permanent a map 
 as faith. The conquests of religions are 
 chiefly those of name and outward form. 
 Unless the population changes, the faith 
 in substance abides. 
 
 To the east of Alexander's boundary 
 will be found Hinduism, Buddhism, Con- 
 fucianism ; to the west, two systems born 
 out of the soil of Alexander's empire, 
 one of the west, Christianity, the other 
 of the east, Mohammedanism, — both of 
 them, in history and outward guise of 
 
 statement, the products of Semitism. If 
 a map of the world should be colored 
 so as to represent the predominant re- 
 ligions of different regions, it would ap- 
 pear that Mohammedanism reaches its 
 eastern frontier essentially at the line 
 drawn from the Jaxartes along the 
 " roof of the world " and down the 
 course of the Indus ; that is, at Alexan- 
 der's old frontier. Its territory repre- 
 sents the oriental or non-occidental por- 
 tion of Alexander's empire. It is itself 
 merely a second growth on western 
 Asiatic soil, a revival and reassertion of 
 orientalism in the reaction from Euro- 
 pean conquest. And yet, when com- 
 pared with the fundamental thought of 
 the systems grown in India and China, 
 it shows itself a creation of our world, 
 and not of the remoter one. 
 
 Upon our colored map we should find, 
 further, that the territory of Eastern 
 Christianity corresponds in general to 
 the sphere of influence of ancient Athens 
 and Byzantium ; that the territory of Ro- 
 man Catholicism corresponds to the do- 
 main of the Western Roman Empire, — 
 Italy, the Spanish Peninsula, France, 
 and the Rhine and Danube valleys of 
 Central Europe ; while the old Germani, 
 who withstood the legions of Drusus and 
 Varus, are represented still by the indi- 
 vidualistic Protestants of the north. 
 
 The civilization of the Nearer World 
 had its birth in the two centres Egypt 
 and Babylonia. It was in the long 
 river valleys of the Nile and the Eu- 
 phrates that the two types of ordered 
 life we call by the names Egyptian and 
 Assyrian gained their strength and their 
 individuality. Their meeting-place and 
 agora was the eastern Mediterranean, 
 its coast lands and islands. Here the 
 resultant of the Mesopotamian and 
 Egyptian civilizations united as a female 
 principle with the virility of European 
 occidentalism, and the fruit was that civ- 
 ilization upon which European history, 
 and all the history we have hitherto 
 cared for, is based. 
 
The Old World in the New. 
 
 Consciousness of the power of individ- 
 ual initiative has been throughout the 
 characteristic feature in occidentalism ; 
 passive conformity to the ordinance of 
 fate and the settled order of the world, 
 the spirit of orientalism. The West is 
 aggressive, the East passive ; the West 
 finds the source of creation and action 
 in the individual, the East in the govern- 
 ing power, be it state or fate. The West 
 looks outward, and seeks to comprehend 
 and control the material universe of its 
 environment ; the East looks within, and, 
 learning from the winds and the stars 
 only the lessons of moral order and the 
 mandates of destiny imposed upon the 
 soul, seeks to know and control the things 
 of the spirit. 
 
 In this fabric of the Nearer World 
 joined of the West and the East, the 
 East supplied the informing spirit, the 
 ordered hf e, the civilization ; the West, 
 the moving will and the arm of power. 
 First Greece, then Rome, then in their 
 turn the peoples of the north, assumed 
 the leadership. Fresh blood of will and 
 empire was drawn constantly from the 
 north. But, however empire might 
 change, the old frontier between the 
 West and the nearer East tended to 
 maintain itself where it was when his- 
 tory dawned, — at the ^Egean and the 
 Bosporus. Two years ago all eyes 
 were turned toward the ^gean. Crete, 
 Greece, Constantinople, and the Turk 
 were words on every lip. All issues of 
 international politics were quoted solely 
 in terms of the old Bosporus question. 
 The history of the Nearer World had 
 simply gone back for another bout on 
 the old field, — the field on wliich the 
 first contests were fought, and to which 
 most of the contests since have been re- 
 ferred in real or spectred battle. 
 
 Viewing history in the large, we can- 
 not fail to see that the world we live 
 in is essentially a Mediterranean world. 
 All its fundamental forms and moulds 
 for law and government, art, architec- 
 ture, and literature, thought and faith, 
 
 were created beside the Mediterranean ; 
 all its political and religious struggles, 
 all its wars, were the fighting over of 
 old Mediterranean questions ; and as a 
 system of types and forms, it never can 
 be really understood and known except 
 as it be reduced to Mediterranean terms, 
 and studied in the perspective of a Ro- 
 man, Greek, or Syrian horizon. 
 
 Such was the life habit of the Near- 
 er World. To-day all this has changed. 
 Suddenly the centre of interest has 
 shifted from the ^gean to the Yellow 
 Sea. A class of questions has arisen, 
 overwhelming, in the magnitude of the 
 issues they involve, all the great ques- 
 tions of earlier days, and none of them 
 admits solution in terms of the Medi- 
 terranean ; none of them concerns the 
 Mediterranean, or its peoples, or its 
 history. That which the silent course 
 of events has long been preparing, now 
 in the fullness of time is come. Almost 
 without a sign of warning we are trans- 
 ferred from the history of the Nearer 
 World to the history of the Great 
 World, and to that history the life and 
 the interests of the great dominant peo- 
 ples of the earth will hereafter belong. 
 
 To no people is the transition of more 
 profound and fundamental importance 
 than to the people of the United States. 
 It involves for them nothing less than a 
 rethinking of the entire problem of na- 
 tional purpose, destiny, and duty. 
 
 The old history, which we have called 
 the history of the Nearer World, dealt 
 with the antagonisms and the blending 
 of its two component factors, occidental- 
 ism and orientalism ; the new history 
 will record the process of assimilation 
 which follows the uniting of the two 
 halves of the whole world. There can 
 be no question as to which of the two 
 will conquer and control, according to 
 the external forms of conquest ; but it 
 is idle for us, in the light of historical 
 experience, to imagine that the blending 
 is to mean nothing more than the absorp- 
 tion of the East by the West, — nothing 
 
The Old World in the JSfew. 
 
 more than the exploitation of China and 
 India by the greed and power, or even 
 the enlightenment, of Western nations- 
 Rome conquered Greece, but was con- 
 quered by its art, its manners, and its 
 thought. Europe, in the form of Greece, 
 and then of Rome, subjugated Asia ; but 
 Asiatic wealth and luxury reshaped Eu- 
 ropean life, and Europe has its religion 
 from the conquered people. We may 
 easily underestimate the solidity of these 
 civilizations we confront, and the perma- 
 nence of their forms of life and of their 
 moulds of thought. The economic con- 
 ditions, the political ideas, and the funda- 
 mental religious and philosophic thought 
 of our world cannot and will not escape, 
 in the great leveling that is to come, the 
 most far-reaching and momentous trans- 
 formation. England has touched yet 
 only the surface of India, merely the hem 
 of the garment ; but her commerce, the 
 equipment of her life, her governmental 
 mechanism and ideals, have already been 
 radically influenced, and the marvelous 
 effect which acquaintance with Hindu 
 thought is exercising upon men's funda- 
 mental thought of the world has spread 
 far beyond the circles of the learned and 
 of the faddists, and, I am persuaded, can 
 be estimated in its profound importance 
 only by the historians of later days. 
 
 Both India and China embody types of 
 life and forms of thought which, strange 
 and incomprehensible as they may be to 
 us, have been shapen and polished in 
 the mills of a human experience repre- 
 senting in composite the experience of 
 more human souls than have elsewhere 
 shared a common life. 
 
 India is the land of the vast and the 
 boundless, the true motherland of the ro- 
 mantic. Endlessly prolific, she sets no 
 restraint on the imagination. So India 
 lacks that which was to the Greek, as the 
 representative occidental, the supremest 
 virtue, temperate control, — " naught to 
 excess." The tumid, redundant forms 
 of her art, as of her literature and her 
 theogony, attest the absence of that sense 
 
 of due economy and fitness which made 
 the creations of the Greek eternal models 
 of restraint and harmony. To the ag- 
 gressive occidental, time is the opportu- 
 nity of action, time is money ; for the 
 Hindu, there were no days or years, and 
 hence no history. 
 
 The occidental is a pluralist ; person- 
 alities, individual psyches, are for him 
 the starting-points, the prime factors of 
 the universe ; to enforce personality and 
 make it effective is the mission of life. 
 The Hindu is a monist ; the world-all 
 is the starting-point ; personality is an 
 aberration from it ; to bring this person- 
 ality back to rest, absorbed into accord 
 with the world-all, is the toil and mission 
 of life. Knowledge is the recipe of sal- 
 vation ; ignorance is the sin. 
 
 China is another cosmos. It is pre- 
 eminently the land of the practical. Its 
 world is the established social order of 
 men fixed in forms and conventions, 
 whose authority is absolute, as their rea- 
 sons are past finding out. Life is a 
 drama. Men merely play parts. The 
 " look-see " (appearance) and the " make- 
 see " (delusive persuasion) constitute the 
 substance of life. The starting-point and 
 whole of things is neither the world-all 
 nor the individual soul, but the stage and 
 scenery and plot into which the individ- 
 ual must fit the action of his part, and 
 within which take his role. There is no 
 truth, no real. 
 
 With the Greek it is intemperance or 
 " slopping over " which is the sin, with 
 the Hindu ignorance, with the Chinaman 
 innovation. The purpose of education 
 is, for the Greek, to give personality 
 its maximum of effectiveness ; for the 
 Hindu, to endow it with a knowledge 
 that shall reveal the hindrances to union 
 with the world-all ; for the Chinaman, 
 to force the individuality, like a Chinese 
 girl's foot into a shoe, into the fixed role 
 or craft it must use in this present life. 
 The Greek education is frankly the lib- 
 eral education ; the Chinese, frankly pro- 
 fessional and technical. 
 
6 
 
 The Old World in the New. 
 
 China has perhaps one fourth the pop- 
 ulation of the globe, but no one suspects 
 it of schemes of imperial conquest. The 
 "yellow clanger" menacing the world 
 comes not from the thrifty tradesmen 
 and peasants of China. China is a na- 
 tion without a fist. Its people are lack- 
 ing in any idea or motive around which 
 could be assembled the sentiments of pa- 
 triotism. Devotion to the honoring of 
 ancestors and solicitude for private gain 
 are the two sentiments of a people who 
 constitute, not a nation nor a state, but a 
 scheme of living. 
 
 The new history is to be concerned, 
 then, with the assimilation of these two 
 strange and mutually diverse elements of 
 the farther world to the substance of the 
 nearer world, — just as the old world 
 history involved an assimilation of West 
 and East. With the parallel goes also a 
 contrast. The old history centred about 
 an inland sea. All its issues had their 
 ultimate home by the Mediterranean. 
 In the new history the world is turned 
 wrong side out. The outer ocean is the 
 agora. Power is estimated in terms of 
 navies rather than of armies. Coal is 
 king, and coaling-stations mark the bonds 
 of empire as the Roman military roads 
 did of old. The pattern of the world 
 has been turned inside out. The old 
 world, like an ancient house, was built to- 
 ward the inside and its colonnaded court ; 
 the new is built toward the outside, with 
 windows and veranda. 
 
 The old history had its Eastern Ques- 
 tion ; the new has its Easternmost Ques- 
 tion. In the later phases of the old, 
 Turkey was the "sick man;" in the 
 new, it is China ; and where the car- 
 cass is, there are the eagles gathered to- 
 gether. The old involved the constant 
 query who should be the leader of the 
 Occident, — Greece, Rome, France, Ger- 
 many, England, Russia ? The new asks 
 who shall hold the empire and lead the 
 civilization of the world ; shall it be the 
 Slav, the Teuton, or the Latin ? 
 
 The aggressiveness shown by France 
 
 in colonial enterprise is scarcely more 
 than artificial ; it represents no inner 
 need or impulse except as it be a yearn- 
 ing for bonds and shares. France is 
 reaUy smitten with the palsy of her own 
 prudence and thrift. Families are small. 
 Sons are not put through the school of 
 self-reliance. A nation lacking men who 
 know how to take risks and assume the 
 responsibility of their own choices can- 
 not compete for leadership among the 
 peoples. French is the language of a 
 diplomacy which lives on in the close at- 
 mosphere of the old Mediterranean con- 
 troversies ; out in the breezy ocean world, 
 the greater world, the medium of inter- 
 national intercourse tends to be English. 
 A colder-blooded people than any of 
 the Latin race will win the contest, in 
 these days of organization and calcula- 
 tion and mechanism and coal. The Ger- 
 man is patient enough and practical 
 enough. He is, like his Anglo-Saxon 
 brother by nature, a stout champion of 
 individual freedom, but he lacks some- 
 thing his brother possesses. This some- 
 thing it is not easy to describe, but the 
 lack of it allows him to tolerate the yoke 
 of Caesarism, imported from the Latin 
 world ; gives him ready adaptability to 
 the institutions of other peoples, so that 
 he is quickly absorbed ; and, most char- 
 acteristic of all, forbids his appreciation 
 of a game like football. 
 
 The character in which the English- 
 man asserts his right to rule an empire 
 is the character demanded by this most 
 truly Anglo-Saxon sport. It is made up 
 of roughness, willingness to risk, absence 
 of supersensitiveness, fearful directness, 
 and a sublime devotion to fair play. The 
 typical Englishman believes iia venturing, 
 hard hitting, blunt truth-telling, equal 
 justice, and personal cleanliness- 
 England had the start of Continental 
 Europe in preparing for the issues of the 
 new history, in that the English Chan- 
 nel enabled her to free herself eai*ly from 
 the more baneful entanglements of the 
 Mediterranean quarrels. England has 
 
The Old World in the New. 
 
 long been living in the world whose 
 agora is the open seas. Not until these 
 last days of the nineteenth century, how- 
 ever, has her one prosjiective rival, Rus- 
 sia, been able to find a way out into the 
 world. This vast power, spanning at 
 the north half the globe, was until this 
 year pent up as an inland state. Arch- 
 angel and the Baltic ports are ice-blocked 
 for a portion of the year. Vladivostok, 
 founded in 1858, and afterward selected 
 as a terminus for the Siberian railway, is 
 closed to navigation four months in each 
 year. Odessa is blocked at the Bosporus. 
 
 England has diligently kept the barri- 
 ers up between Russia and the sea. In 
 1878 she checked her at the gates of 
 Constantinople ; in 1886, when Russia 
 was in control of the passes of the Hin- 
 du-Kush, and could see her way out to 
 the ocean by way of Afghanistan, Brit- 
 ish power again raised the dykes, and 
 since then the occupation by England of 
 the Mekran and the Chitral valley has 
 set a double rampart against Russian ad- 
 vance. It remains yet for England to 
 occupy the Persian Gulf, and join it by 
 rail to the coast where Beaconsfield set 
 Cyprus on guard. 
 
 The events attending the Chinese- 
 Japanese war were of most serious con- 
 sequence to England's policy and*inter- 
 est. Before the war began, she was the 
 trusted adviser of China, and her pro- 
 tector against Russian aggression. Be- 
 fore the war ended, England found her- 
 self identified with Japan, a nation she 
 had underestimated too long, and sud- 
 denly came to appreciate. Russia, sup- 
 ported by her associates, Germany and 
 France, assumed the role of protecting 
 friend discarded by England, checked 
 and nullified the victory of Japan, and 
 China is now almost her vassal. That 
 which it has been the constant aim of 
 English diplomacy and power for years 
 to prevent has come about within this 
 year. Russia has a harbor in the Yel- 
 low Sea, has gained a foothold on the 
 shore of the iceless ocean. The astute- 
 
 ness of Li Hung Chang, on the other 
 hand, has seen' the way for bringing the 
 product of Chinese industry to the West- 
 ern world by the overland route, and 
 China is to be introduced to the West by 
 help and intermediation of Russia. Here- 
 in lies the quid pro quo. 
 
 Russia's strength is in her geographic 
 position. Unmenaced in the rear, span- 
 ning Europe and Asia, and knowing no 
 difference between them, she bides her 
 time, and slowly pushes her way south 
 like a mighty glacier. Gradually the 
 barriers give way. Germany, which once 
 held her in check at the west, is now — 
 thanks to Bismarck's anti-English policy, 
 continued by the young Emperor — in 
 league with her and in commercial war 
 with England. In Continental diplomacy 
 she is supreme arbiter. Panslavism and 
 the Eastern Church have carried her 
 around Constantinople almost to the 
 shores of the ^gean, and the first oppor- 
 tunity of England's preoccupation will 
 give her exit through the Bosporus. 
 Steadily she works her way into Central 
 Asia, where the half-oriental temper of 
 her people makes her government pecu- 
 liarly acceptable, and her administration 
 in general fortunate and wise. 
 
 Entered in the lists for the world 
 empire are, then, these two. The con- 
 flict is set for which generations have 
 been preparing. Where is our place ? 
 Russia is our old-time friend. When- 
 ever we have been at issue with Eng- 
 land, Russia has lost no opportunity to 
 show sympathy with us. England is a 
 mother who has constantly ignored or 
 underestimated us. With a blindness 
 of vision almost unparalleled in all the 
 stupidities of statesmanship, her ruling 
 class have committed wrong after wrong 
 against us, in slight and misjudgment and 
 selfishness, all culminating in the attitude 
 toward us during the war for the pre- 
 servation of the Union. But the heart 
 of the great English middle class has 
 always been right. The English com- 
 mon man, with a fine consciousness of 
 
The Old World in the New. 
 
 affinity, regards us as his own, and re- 
 joices in the American states as a crea- 
 tion and vindication of his own kind. 
 The English country squire is fading 
 away, and the plain commoner is com- 
 ing to a hearing. And we are of one 
 kind. When the battle is set between 
 the Slav and the Anglo-Saxon, our hearts 
 prove us inheritors of more than Anglo- 
 Saxon blood : we are inheritors of the 
 principles embodied in Anglo-Saxon life. 
 
 The Slav stands for government which 
 has the sanctions of its authority from 
 above and without ; the Anglo-Saxon, for 
 one whose authority has its source in 
 the governed themselves. One follows 
 the rule of exjjediencies, and holds that 
 what succeeds is right ; the other builds 
 solid achievement on the things that are 
 real, and believes in the blunt word of 
 truth. One raises the barriers of re- 
 stricted privilege ; the other opens the 
 markets and the courts of the world to 
 equal opportunity and even justice. One 
 builds on the distrust of the purposes 
 and the intelligence of men ; the other, 
 upon the high optimism of democracy. 
 To one the state is a prison or strait- 
 jacket ; to the other it is the training- 
 school of the race, where responsibility 
 begets character, and free opportunity 
 begets content. 
 
 There can be no doubt of our sympa- 
 thy, — what is our duty ? Has the new 
 order of the world brought us new obli- 
 gations of duty ? The old world linger- 
 ing in the meshes of Mediterraneanism 
 afforded us no interests but such as we 
 might well wish to shun with all their " en- 
 tangling alliances." The barrier of the 
 ocean removed us from the old world 
 gathered about its inland sea, and set us 
 apart in the far West at one side of the 
 earth. The utilization of this barrier 
 has afforded us the opportunity for es- 
 tablishing ourselves in possession and use 
 of our soil, and for developing our re- 
 sources and our system of government. 
 
 But now the old world has passed. 
 History is turned inside out. The outer 
 
 ocean is the agora ; the whole world, not 
 half, is involved ; and instead of being, 
 as in the old order of things, far at one 
 side, we stand full in the midst, — mid- 
 way between Europe and its goal in the 
 Farther East. Sooner than any pro- 
 phet could have foreseen, the question is 
 upon us. 
 
 Our old-time policy of resisting arbi- 
 trary European interference in the af- 
 fairs of American peoples has been ex- 
 tended, under the pressure of what we 
 believe is a genuine humanitarian senti- 
 ment, into intervention against a Euro- 
 pean misgovernment in Cuba which had 
 passed the limits of toleration, and, hav- 
 ing ceased to be government, had become 
 a case of arbitrary interference in the 
 course of American events. 
 
 The moment we took this step we be- 
 came involved in the great world pro- 
 blems. England's position in the Far 
 East hurried her to our side, and gave us 
 her welcome to participation in wider 
 responsibilities for the order of the world. 
 England and America, alienated in terms 
 of the Nearer World's life, have found 
 each other on the field of the Greater 
 World. They belong together, and their 
 union means not only a check to the Rus- 
 sian menace, but peace and the orderly 
 development of civilization in the world. 
 
 Many of us deplored the Spanish war ; 
 many of us now look forward with anx- 
 ious solicitude concerning the effect of 
 victory on the victor ; but still, as we 
 survey the movements of human history 
 in the large, we cannot fail to see in all 
 that is occurring the inevitable grist of 
 the mills of the gods and the irrefragable 
 judgments of the Weltgericht. Spain 
 and the Middle Ages could not tarry in 
 the West. We, on the other hand, could 
 not shut ourselves within the walled gar- 
 dens of our pleasant domesticity, and 
 shun responsibilities that the commerce 
 and intercourse of the larger world ex- 
 act of those who stand for order and 
 equal justice in the affairs of men. 
 
 While, then, we may well be called 
 
TJie Old World in the, New. 
 
 9 
 
 upon now to readjust our conception of 
 national purpose and duty to the new 
 order and our new position, we dare not 
 be false to ourselves or our past. Our 
 charter and creed we must interpret, if 
 no longer in the letter, then all the more 
 scrupulously in the spirit. However the 
 letter and the form may fade and vanish 
 away, there are some things that must 
 needs abide. A nation proclaiming gov- 
 ernment of the people and for the peo- 
 ple cannot impose on conquered peoples 
 a foreign sway, or one that finds its su- 
 preme motive in the benefits accruing to 
 others than the governed. We must 
 stand as we were founded, a nation that 
 draws diverse interests and diverse com- 
 munities into peaceful cooperation under 
 
 recognition of the rights of the individual 
 man, and the self-government of peoples 
 and states. 
 
 Conquest and empire, and all that be- 
 longs thereto both of method and of idea, 
 are utterly abhorrent to the theory of 
 those institutions through which America 
 has aspired to enlighten the world, and 
 utterly foreign to the structure our fa- 
 thers reared out of their stony griefs and 
 cemented with their faith. 
 
 It is character that counts in nations 
 as in individuals. Only in loyalty to the 
 old can we serve the new ; only in un- 
 derstanding of the past can we interpret 
 and use the present ; for history is not 
 made, but unfolded, and the old world 
 entire is ever present in the new. 
 
 Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 
 
.r^%.,i 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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