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