Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/135

Rh part of the cosmic order of things which we have no power to alter."

Whether Mr. Kidd recognizes the odious significance of his captivating speculation or not, it is certainly a plea and an apology for slavery and political despotism in the tropics. Most welcome will it be to all those nations and people of easy conscience and measureless greed that now hold in bondage of greater or less intensity millions of the inhabitants of that rich and splendid region. But there is reason to believe that it must be relegated to the limbo of a kindred and popular superstition. Within the past year much has been said about the genius of the Anglo-Saxon for freedom and the ethnic incapacity of the Latins for that boon of civilization. Even so great a scholar as Guizot encourages this extraordinary theory. Again and again does he point out in his History of Civilization how the spirit of freedom may be traced to the Teutonic hordes that swarmed the forests of Germany. He does so despite the overwhelming evidence against him to be found in his own pages even. In apology for his misinterpretation of social phenomena there can be urged his ignorance of the law of evolution and of the hardly less important law of the militant origin of despotism and the pacific origin of freedom. No such apology can, however, be made in behalf of Mr. Kidd, or of any other apostle of imperialism. Not only have they at command all the generalizations of social science, but all the facts upon which those generalizations are based, to prove that neither climate nor race is a limitation upon freedom.

If climate determined the character of the political institutions of a people, many questions would be suggested at once that would be beyond solution. Why, for instance, should a certain freedom have existed in Athens, and the most intolerable despotism in Sparta? Again, why should there be despotism in Russia and Germany as well as in Morocco and Egypt? Another series of questions equally perplexing can be raised. Why should there be more freedom in England to-day than six hundred or even one hundred years ago? The climate has not changed in the interval. Why should the institutions of Spain in the thirteenth century have been more liberal than in the seventeenth? Why was it that the freedom that existed in Germany before the Thirty Years' War had virtually ceased to exist at the Peace of Westphalia? Here also the climate had not changed. Why, finally, was there a reaction toward despotism in France after the French Revolution, in Germany after the disturbances of 1848, in England after the Crimean War, and in the United States after the rebellion? The only satisfactory answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that militant activities always lead to despotism, and pacific activities always to freedom. When people get into war, the central power must exercise all the authority over life and property essential to success in battle. The impulse thus given to despotism spreads to every part of the social fabric. When people are devoted to the pursuits of peace, the forces that make for freedom transform their ideas, feelings, morals, and institutions, political, industrial, and social.

Whether despotism exists, as Mr. Kidd and his followers assume, among all the indigenous populations of the tropics, only a careful investigation of the subject would permit one to say. But that it must, as they contend, always exist there, none of the laws of social evolution gives the slightest warrant. Wherever it does exist, it had the same origin that it had in England, and in obedience to the same forces of peace and industry that operated against it in that country, it must pass away. The