g powers of the race, to
the persistence of purpose, the endurance, and the vitality
characteristic of its units. To ambition for individual material
improvement they are not insensible. The collapse of the Chinese
organization in all its branches during the late war with Japan,
though greater than was expected, was not unforeseen. It has not
altered the fact that the raw material so miserably utilized is, in
point of strength, of the best; that it is abundant, racially
homogeneous, and is multiplying rapidly. Nor, with the recent
resuscitation of the Turkish army before men's eyes, can it be thought
unlikely that the Chinese may yet obtain the organization by which
alone potential force receives adequate military development, the most
easily conferred because the simplest in conception. The Japanese have
shown great capacity, but they met little resistance; and it is easier
by far to move and to control an island kingdom of forty millions than
a vast continental territory containing near tenfold that number of
inhabitants. Comparative slowness of evolution may be predicated, but
that which for so long has kept China one, amid many diversities, may
be counted upon in the future to insure a substantial unity of impulse
which, combined with its mass, will give tremendous import to any
movement common to the whole.

To assert that a few selected characteristics, such as the above,
summarize the entire tendency of a century of teeming human life, and
stand alone among the signs that are chiefly to be considered in
looking to the future, would be to take an untenable position. It may
be said safely, however, that these factors, because the future to
which they point is more remote, are less regarded than others which
are less important; and further, that those among them which mark our
own day are also the factors whose very existence is specially
resented, criticised, and condemned by that school of political
thought which assumes for itself the title of economical, which
attained its maturity, and still lives, amid the ideas of that stage
of industrial progress coincident with the middle of the century, and
which sees all things from the point of view of production and of
internal development. Powerfully exerted throughout the world, nowhere
is the influence of this school so unchecked and so injurious as in
the United States, because, having no near neighbors to compete with
us in point of power, military necessities hav