their own and the level best of ours, and by amalgamating the two,
build higher than we ever have. There is just one way in all this world
that we can beat Eastern civilization and all that it intends to do to
us eventually. The white man has dominated by his color so far in the
history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men
of color acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of
living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater
numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they
have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it,
and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don't,
they will beat us at any game we start, if we don't take warning while
we are in the ascendancy, and keep there."

"Well, there is something to think about," said Donald Whiting,
staring past Linda at the side of the canyon as if he had seen the
same handwriting on the wall that dismayed Belshazzar at the feast that
preceded his downfall.

"I see what you're getting at," he said. "I had thought that there might
be some way to circumvent him."

"There is!" broke in Linda hastily. "There is. You can beat him, but you
have got to beat him in an honorable way and in a way that is open to
him as it is to you."

"I'll do anything in the world if you will only tell me how," said
Donald. "Maybe you think it isn't grinding me and humiliating me
properly. Maybe you think Father and Mother haven't warned me. Maybe
you think Mary Louise isn't secretly ashamed of me. How can I beat him,
Linda?"

Linda's eyes were narrowed to a mere line. She was staring at the wall
back of Donald as if she hoped that Heaven would intercede in her favor
and write thereon a line that she might translate to the boy's benefit.

"I have been watching pretty sharply," she said. "Take them as a race,
as a unit--of course there are exceptions, there always are--but the
great body of them are mechanical. They are imitative. They are not
developing anything great of their own in their own country. They are
spreading all over the world and carrying home sewing machines and
threshing machines and automobiles and cantilever bridges and submarines
and aeroplanes--anything from eggbeaters to telescopes. They are not
creating one single thing. They are not missing imitating everything
that the white man can do anywhere else on earth. They are just like the
Germans