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.