a high and stern sense of duty,
of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my
hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think
me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my
theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as
little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.
But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think
soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is
the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have
a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.
No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

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 an 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 apprehended, are at work all around us, both for
good and for evil. The growth in luxury, 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 the 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 diminution so great that if it continues for the next
century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
all the more highly civilized peoples 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 concern 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. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr
hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-and
fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to
the