Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/15

Rh progress, and they must affect more powerfully than before the economic conditions of labour and production among the advanced races. It is hardly too much to say that for economic purposes all mankind is fast becoming one people, in which the hitherto backward nations are taking a place analogous to that which the unskilled workers have held in each one of the civilized nations. Such an event opens a new stage in World-history, a stage whose significance has perhaps been as yet scarcely realized either by the thinker or by the man of action, because the historical thinker sometimes overlooks the present in his study of the past, while the man of action may be so much occupied by the present as to forget what the past has to teach him.

I do not, however, propose to-day to discuss this new economic stage, but rather the conditions which precede it and will give a character to it, viz. the phenomena that attend the contact of the civilized and uncivilized races, whether by way of conquest, or of trade, or of settlement on the same ground.

We may pass by the question of what constitutes racial difference, merely observing that stress must not be laid upon linguistic affinities; nor need we inquire how far the present backwardness of a race indicates inferior natural capacity, being content to take the existing state of things as we find it. Let us go straight to the facts and problems which the contact of diverse races brings into being.

When two races differing in strength, that is to say, either in numbers, or in physical capacity, or in mental capacity, or in material advancement, or in military