The Green Forest tribune., 1910-06-10

1 and fought very well, they refused in | time of peace to make ready fleets so ef- flcient as either to insure the Dutch | against the peace being broken or else | to give them the victory when war | came. To be opulent and unarmed Is to secure ease in the present at the almost l certain cost of disaster in the future. | It is therefore easy to see why Holland l lost when she did her position among the powers; but 1t is far more difficult to ex- plain why at the same time there should l have come at least partial loss of posi- | tion in the world of art and letters. Some | spark of divine fire burned itself out in | the national soul. As the line of great | statesmen, of great warriors, by land and l sea, came to end, so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed the | loss of pre-eminence in camp and in | council chamber.
 In the little republic of Holland, as in | the great empire of Rome, 1t was not | death which came, but transformation. | Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again.
 Danger of Race Suicide.
 There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great | law of death, which Is itself but part of the great law of life? None can tell. Forces that we can see and other forces that are | hidden or that can but dimly be appre- | hended are at work all around us both for good and for evil. The growth in lux | ury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate in tlle rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and Australia a dim mutton so great that if 1t continues for the next century at the rate which has ob- tained for the last 9 years all the more highly civilized people will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward
 There is much that should give us con- cern for the future. But there is much also which should give us hope. No man Is more apt to be mistaken than the prophet of evil I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the bat tie may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor do his al- loted task. and bear himself as valiant ly in defeat in victory. Come what WILL we belong to peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have ex-
 
 part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and vanished: but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all eff fort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with it while the other lea Ses its mark deep on the history of all the future of man kind
 In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogieS between what had oc- cured to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages on this planet and what has occurred and Is occurring to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the worlds | surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the EuphrateS, and the harbors of l Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Aegean craft But of course the parallel is true only in the toughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of today and the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound that must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present based on what has hap pened in the past. While freely admit ting all of our folies and weaknesses of today, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest nec- essary connection between any weaken ing of virile force and this advance in the moral standard this growth of the sense of obligation to ones neighbor and of reluctance to do that neghbor wrong We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindli- ness of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that in national life as the ages go by shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend towards those in which, while the intel | feet stands high. character stands higher; | in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful az | gression by others, will go hand in hand with lofty scorn of doing wrong to oth- CTS. This is the type of Timoleon. of Hampden, of Washington and Lincoln.
 Problems of Modern Nations.
 Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve within its own borders. problems that arise not merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches. but especially from the self-con- sciousness of both poverty and riches Each nation must deal with these mat | ters in it's own fashion. and yet the spirit | in which the problem Is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be a spirit of broad humanity; of brotherly kindness; of acceptance of re- ! sponsibility, one for each and each for all and at the same time a spirit as re- | mote as the poles from every form of weakness and sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward Is to do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of | iuStipe tO give tO the lazy the VipiOnS even the feeble and dull-witted, a reward which is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. | The only effective way to help any man ! Is to help him to help himself; and the | worst lesson to teach him Is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of | some one else. True liberty shows itself | to best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of minorities. | Privilege should not be tolerated because 1t is to the advantage of a minority, nor | yet because 1t is to the advantage of a majority No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body polite. Just lit tie can we afford to follow the doctrin- aires of an impossible-and incidentally of highly undesirable-social revolution which, in destroying individual rights l dncluding property rights) and the fam fly, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two 1 chief reasons why either the advance or l the preservation of mankind is worth