aeroplane and submarine. We know that
these were not due to physical necessities or to any material causes.
They arose from the brooding of creative imaginations disciplined in a
method learned by reflection upon former successes in discovery. We
also know in what main particulars this modern atmosphere differs from
that of former centuries. But such questions are not germane to my
central theme, and so I pass them over lightly. Let me then return
without further delay from this digression which has been made in the
interests, not of my argument, but of my self-respect as a student of
social facts.

XXI. CONTACT OF PEOPLES

Consider, for instance, that at the beginning of our century, for the
first time in more than fifteen hundred years, the Christian nations
came into contact with a mighty pagan power, and were compelled to
acknowledge it as not only a political, but a moral, equal. Whoever
knows the magical effect in the quickening of intellectual and
spiritual life due to new contact with a contrasting type of national
culture will agree that the meeting thus of Christendom with the
so-called "heathen" world is a fact of prime significance in the
history of man.

Nor is it simply the contact of heathen and Christian on terms of moral
equality. There is another aspect to Japan's ascendancy and her
recognition by the West. The East and the West meet at last. The
psychic invasion of each by the other must be epoch-making and in the
direction of the completeness and unification spiritually of all
mankind in a brotherhood of nations and nation-states. The new contact
of heathen and Christian, and of white and colored, of East and West,
means that the exploitation of the dark races by nations more highly
organized on a basis of self-interest is about to cease forever. With
the humanization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes
who never divided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the
"have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical
universe.

Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many
in Old England thought--that there is nothing new under the sun? Then I
would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary
character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative
political and social equality, of immigrants from some fifty-one
different nations of the Old World. These people will mix their blood,
their temperame