world. In brief, if the other nations of the world have
great armies and navies--and tomorrow those other nations will include a
reorganized China as they already include a westernized Japan--if there
is all that weight of military material which might be used against us,
then in the absence of those other guarantees which I shall suggest, we
shall be drawn into piling up a corresponding weight of material as
against that of the outside world.

And, of course, just as we cannot escape the economic and the military
reaction of European development, neither can we escape the moral. If
European thought and morality did, by some fatality, really develop in
the direction of a Nietzschean idealization of military force, we might
well get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality
which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the
older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it
may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or
Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a
mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all
thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape
a like transformation of outlook, ideals, and morals.

For there is no such thing as one nation standing out and maintaining
indefinitely a social spirit, an attitude toward life and society
absolutely distinct and different from that of the surrounding world.
The character of a society is determined by the character of its ideas,
and neither tariffs nor coastal defenses are really efficient in
preventing the invasion of ideas, good or bad. The difference between
the kind of society which exists in Illinois today and that which
existed there 500 years ago is not a difference of physical vigor or of
the raw materials of nature; the Indian was as good a man physically as
the modern Chicagoan, and possessed the same soil. What makes the
difference between the two is accumulated knowledge, the mind. And there
never was yet on this planet a change of ideas which did not sooner or
later affect the whole planet.

The "nations" that inhabited this continent a couple of thousand years
ago were apparently quite unconcerned with what went on in Europe or
Asia, say, in the domain of mathematical and astronomical knowledge. But
the ultimate effect of that knowledge on navigation and discovery was
destined to affect them--and us--prof