Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/52

 developed with a developing intellect is still doubtful, for the future will bring new opportunities.

The present system of great States and the desire of such States to acquire and rule territories beyond their national limits may not be permanent factors. That the chief world-languages will extend their range, that the number of nationalities will diminish, that the population of such countries as Britain, Germany, and Italy will continue, for a good while to come, to spread out into new lands, and that a keen commercial rivalry between producing countries will continue—these things may perhaps be assumed. But it is not safe to assume that the process by which the huge political aggregates we now see have been built up during the last few centuries will also continue. Causes may even be imagined which would break up existing nations into smaller political units.

Questions relating to the future of the great religions lead us into a still vaster and still darker field of uncertainty, a field in which forces reign whose action we can neither calculate nor foretell. Conceive what a difference it might make if Islam were within two centuries to disappear from the earth! The thing is not impossible: perhaps not even improbable.

I have sought to call your attention to a great secular process in the history of the world, a process the steps in which are reckoned by centuries, and whose magnitude transcends the political or commercial questions that claim our thoughts from day to day. It is a process which has now entered a critical phase, and we see opening before us a long vista in which there