is chiefly instructive in this occurrence is the
inevitableness, which it shares in common with the great majority of
cases where civilized and highly organized peoples have trespassed
upon the technical rights of possession of the previous occupants of
the land--of which our own dealings with the American Indian afford
another example. The inalienable rights of the individual are entitled
to a respect which they unfortunately do not always get; but there is
no inalienable right in any community to control the use of a region
when it does so to the detriment of the world at large, of its
neighbors in particular, or even at times of its own subjects.
Witness, for example, the present angry resistance of the Arabs at
Jiddah to the remedying of a condition of things which threatens to
propagate a deadly disease far and wide, beyond the locality by which
it is engendered; or consider the horrible conditions under which the
Armenian subjects of Turkey have lived and are living. When such
conditions obtain, they can be prolonged only by the general
indifference or mutual jealousies of the other peoples concerned--as
in the instance of Turkey--or because there is sufficient force to
perpetuate the misrule, in which case the right is inalienable only
until its misuse brings ruin, or until a stronger force appears to
dispossess it. It is because so much of the world still remains in the
possession of the savage, or of states whose imperfect development,
political or economical, does not enable them to realize for the
general use nearly the result of which the territory is capable, while
at the same time the redundant energies of civilized states, both
government and peoples, are finding lack of openings and scantiness of
livelihood at home, that there now obtains a condition of aggressive
restlessness with which all have to reckon.

That the United States does not now share this tendency is entirely
evident. Neither her government nor her people are affected by it to
any great extent. But the force of circumstances has imposed upon her
the necessity, recognized with practical unanimity by her people, of
insuring to the weaker states of America, although of racial and
political antecedents different from her own, freedom to develop
politically along their own lines and according to their own
capacities, without interference in that respect from governments
foreign to these continents. The duty is self-assumed; and resting, as
it