The Young Man and the World

by Albert J. Beveridge

Especially will Japanese dominance of the Orient, military and commercial, upon which Japan is determined, bring us Americans face to face with a new set of conditions, requiring the highest order of careful thought, the clearest, firmest announcement of national policy. Do not fear, young man, lest all of this be over before the time has come for you to play your part on the stage of human affairs. The new problems which the whole Orient will propose to the entire world, and particularly to America, will last for a century at least.

Indeed, it is probable that our relations with the East will become and remain one of the leading subjects of American statesmanship as long as the Republic endures. For that matter, you may go further, and say that the great human question of modern times is the meeting face to face of Oriental and Occidental ideals, of the white and yellow theory of life and morals, and the gradual destruction of one by the other, or their mutual modification and adjustment.

But we are getting into deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow's national and world problems will be deeper still?

There are three or four great international questions for this Republic to solve on this Western hemisphere, the working out of any one of which means immortality for the statesman who does it.

Of course, the great industrial and sociological questions are the profoundest of all. The world has been at work on these since men arranged themselves into organized society. But the incredibly swift evolution of modern business itself seems to be hastening the time when some satisfactory solution of these master problems must at least be begun.

So that, if you really have the material of a statesman in you—the stuff that thinks out the answer to great questions—there is a field before you compared with which the opportunities of Hamilton and Washington and Jefferson almost seem small, leviathan as those opportunities were and masterfully as those great men improved them.

The editor of one of our big modern newspapers gave it to me as his opinion that the art of producing a newspaper is as much in its infancy as is the science of electricity. "The yellow journal," said he, "is an evolution, just as trusts in their deeper significance are an evolution. We have had the didactic editor; he did his work and has passed away. We are now having the editor who deals with facts—'cold facts,' as Dickens would say—but, in his turn, he is only a part of the general evolution. There is not an editor in this country, no matter what his own views may be as to his own paper, who does not know, and in his heart admit, that the ideal paper is yet to be produced."

Excellent and even wonderful as the public press of to-day is, the above is the opinion held by the great mass of men; and it is the correct opinion. I mean what I say when I use the words "excellent and wonderful" as applied to newspapers. To me the newspaper is a daily astonishment. What we are all in search of is fresh and vital thought and suggestion; and no one can acquire the art of newspaper reading without getting, each day, one or many new points of view on the world and its great human currents.

Each one of our metropolitan papers is at enormous outlay to get strong, capable men—young men with new minds and old men with wise minds. It is simply out of the question for these men, working together, to bring forth a product that does not have in it some remarkable thing—some new point of view, some fact which your most careful research has not disclosed to you.

I remember an instance in my own experience. There was a subject to which I had given some years of off-and-on study. I felt that at least the facts had been accumulated. All that remained was to deduce the truth from these facts. But an editorial on this subject in a notable daily paper brought out a salient fact which none of the books had mentioned, and yet which, when one's attention was called to it, was so apparent that it really ought to have suggested itself. Yet all the speeches of the specialists on this subject, and all of the volumes, had failed to note it.