cannot live and farm his land in competition with the Asiatic; that was
conclusively proved in the days of Rome.

But it is not imaginable that Asiatics will submit to this discrimination
in silence. Nothing can probably constrain them to resignation but force,
and to apply force is to revert to the old argument of the savage or the
despot, who admits that he knows no law save that of the stronger, which
is the system, however much we have disguised it and, in short, lied about
it, under which we have lived and under which our ancestors have lived
ever since the family was organized, and under which it is probable that
we shall continue to live as long as any remnant of civilization shall
survive.

Nevertheless, it seems to be far from improbable that the system of
industrial, capitalistic civilization, which came in, in substance, with
the "free thought" of the Reformation, is nearing an end. Very probably it
may have attained to its ultimate stages and may dissolve presently in the
chaos which, since the Reformation, has been visibly impending. Democracy
in America has conspicuously and decisively failed, in the collective
administration of the common public property. Granting thus much, it
becomes simply a question of relative inefficiency, or degradation of
type, culminating in the exhaustion of resources by waste; unless the
democratic man can supernaturally raise himself to some level more nearly
approaching perfection than that on which he stands. For it has become
self-evident that the democrat cannot change himself from a competitive to
a non-competitive animal by talking about it, or by pretending to be
already or to be about to become other than he is,--the victim of infinite
conflicting forces.

BROOKS ADAMS,