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of Europe. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, neither the Hollanders, fighting with despair for their own firesides, nor the Scotch and English volunteers, actuated by love of fighting and zeal for their faith, were able on anything like equal terms to hold their own against the Spanish armies, who walked at will to and fro through the Netherlands, save where strong city walls or burst dykes held them at bay. Yet the Hollander, the Englishman and the Scotchman were trained soldiers, and they were spurred by every hope and feeling which we ordinarily accept as making men formidable in fight. A century passed; and these same Spaniards had become contemptible creatures in war compared with the Dutch and Scotch, the English and French, whom they had once surpassed. Many partial explanations can be given for the change, but none that wholly or mainly explains it.

What is true of military prowess is even more true of national life as a whole. I do not see how any thinking man can fail to feel now and then ugly doubts as to what may befall our modern civilization-the civilization of the white races, who have spread their influence over the entire world—and the culture they have inherited or acquired in extreme western Asia and in Europe during the last three or four thousand years. There are unpleasant analogies between the twentieth century and Hellenistic antiquity in the first period of the past Alexandrian monarchies; and of course the resemblance is even closer with the orderly, peace-loving, cultivated Roman world from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius. The resemblances are in the way of analogy rather than homology, it is true, and there are deep fundamental differences. But the resemblances are there. Why the creative literary spirit should practically have vanished from Roman lands after the time of Trajan, we do not know. We can see better why the citizens lost the traits which make good individual soldiers; but we can not see why the very time of the astounding urban growth of North Africa, Gaul and Spain should have been coincident with the growth of utter inability to organize on a suffi

ciently large scale either in peace or war, until everything grew to depend upon the ability of one or two men on top. Much of the fall of the Roman Republic we can account for. For one thing, I do not think historians have ever laid sufficient emphasis on the fact that the widening of the franchise in Italy and the provinces meant so little from the governmental standpoint because citizens could only vote in one city, Rome; I should hate at this day to see the United States governed by votes cast in the city of New York, even though Texas, Oregon and Maine could in theory send their people thither to vote if they chose. But the reasons for the change in military and governmental ability under the empire between, say, the days of Hadrian and of Valens are hardly even to be guessed at.

I have always been greatly interested in what you point out as to the inability of the people of that strip of western Asia which is geographically North Africa ever to recover themselves from the downfall of the Roman Empire. It is a rather irritating delusion-the delusion that somehow or other we are all necessarily going to move forward in the long run no matter what the temporary checks may be. I have a very firm faith in this general forward movement, considering only men of our own race for the past score or two centuries, and I hope and believe that the movement will continue for an indefinite period to come; but no one can be sure; there is certainly nothing inevitable or necessary about the movement. For a thousand years, from the days of Alexander to the days of Mahomet, in spite of fluctuations, the civilization of Asia west of the Euphrates was that of Greeks and of Asiatics profoundly affected by Greek influence. Then it disappeared from the land; just as the extraordinary Roman civilization disappeared from North Africa, and left not a single vestige behind save the ruins of cities and the masonry around the springs that have dried up under the destructive impotence of the rule that succeeded it.

It is hopeful of course to think how peoples do revive now and then; peoples doubtless partly the same in blood as

those that fell, and at least with the ancestral inheritance of language, of culture. You have pointed out the greatest instance of this in Italy. A totally different and much smaller example is furnished by modern Switzerland.

The intrusion of an alien race into another civilization, its growth and supremacy and dying away, is of course curiously paralleled by what we see in the animal world, and the parallel is complete in at least one point-that is, in the fact that in such case the causes may be shrouded in absolute darkness. South America, until the middle of the Tertiary period, had a mammalian fauna almost as unique as that of Australia, composed chiefly of small marsupials, and of what we loosely call edentatas, also of small size. Then there occurred physical union with the great arctogeal continent by the Isthmus of Panama. There followed an inrush of northern fauna and an extraordinarily powerful and abundant faunal life sprang up. The dominant forms were those of the intruders-sabertooth tigers, bear, deer, elephants, swine, camels, tapirs, horses, all of great abundance in species, and many of the species of giant size. Under the pressure most of the old forms disappeared; but some of the so-called edentates developed into ground sloths and giant armadillos as large as elephants; and some of these forms when thus developed proved not only able to hold their own in South America, but gradually in their turn made their way north across the Isthmus and spread into North America in the teeth of the competition of the descendants of the forms that had anciently overrun South America. Thus there grew up in South America a faunal life as gigantic, as fierce, as varied, as that of Central Africa at this moment, and on the whole more like that of Central Africa than like the life of South America to-day, and infinitely more so than like the old eocene life of South America. Then there came a change, we know not why. In North America the glacial period may have had much to do with it, but surely this can not have been true of South America; yet all of these huge formidable creatures died out, alike the monsters of alien

type from the North, and the monsters developed from ancient autochthonous types. A few weak representatives were left, of both types; but the old magnificent fauna completely vanished; and why we can not say, any more than we can explain why the Roman so completely failed permanently to leave North Africa to his descendants.

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Of course there is a small side trouble, due to our terminology. All species of animals of course ultimately disappear, some because their kind entirely dies out, and some because the species is transformed into a wholly different species, degenerate or not; but in our nomenclature we make no distinction between the two utterly different kinds of 'disappearance." So it is, of course, with nations. I really believe that people sometimes think of "new" nations as being suddenly created out of nothing; they certainly speak as if they were not aware that the newest and the oldest nations and races must of course have identically the same length of racial pedigree. They talk, moreover, of the "destruction" of the inhabitants of Mexico, and of the "destruction" of the inhabitants of Tasmania, as if the processes were alike. In Tasmania the people were absolutely destroyed; none of their blood is left. But the bulk of the blood of Mexico, and a part of the blood of the governing classes of Mexico (including Diaz), is that of the Mexicans whom Cortez and his successors conquered. In the same way Australia and Canada and the United States are "new" commonwealths only in the sense that Syracuse and Cyrene were new compared with Athens and Corinth.

Another thing that makes one feel irritated is the way that people insist on speaking as if what has occurred during the last three or four hundred years represented part of the immutable law of nature. The military supremacy of the whites is an instance in point. From the rise of the Empire of Genghis Khan to the days of Selim, the Mongol and Turkish tribes were unquestionably the military superiors of the peoples of the Occident, and when they came into conflict it was the former who almost always appeared

as invaders and usually as victors. Yet people speak of the Japanese victories over the Russians as if they had been without precedent throughout the ages.

One practical problem of statesmanship, by the way, must be to keep on good terms with these same Japanese and their kinsmen on the mainland of Asia, and yet to keep the white man in America and Australia out of home contact with them. It is equally to the interest of the British Empire and of the United States that there should be no immigration in mass from Asia to Australia or to North America. It can be prevented, and an entirely friendly feeling between Japan and the English speaking peoples preserved, if we act with sufficient courtesy and at the same time with sufficient resolution. But this is leaving speculative history for present politics.

With regard,

Sincerely yours,

(Signed) THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Indifference to wealth was one of his strongest characteristics. His feeling in regard to it is defined in a letter to Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, on April 11, 1908:

"As a matter of fact, I am anxious to have it understood that it is not necessary to be a multimillionaire in order to reach the highest positions in the American diplomatic service. I am simply unable to understand the value placed by so many people upon great wealth. I very thoroughly understand the need of sufficient means to enable the man or woman to be comfortable; I also entirely understand the pleasure of having enough more than this to add certain luxuries, and above all, that greatest of all luxuries, the escape from the need of considering at every turn whether it is possible to spend a dollar or two extra; but when the last limit has been reached, then increase in wealth means but little, certainly as compared with all kinds of other things. In consequence, I am simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such an enormous multitude of people

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