“No Nation has a right
to remain
in the backwoods”
See page [169].
Like all natural laws it is merciless; and being a natural law it is neither to be condemned nor justified; yet again, like other natural laws, its rigor may and should be mitigated. In short, the superior race should regard the inferior much as a schoolmaster does an intractable youth, who must be dealt with kindly and patiently, admonished repeatedly and perhaps punished severely.
No nation has a right to remain in the backwoods. A country that shuts its eyes to progress in other lands, a people whose all-sufficient answer is, “What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us”, a nation which stands for tyranny, for corruption, for instability, for retrogression, of any sort, has no one to blame but itself when the widening breach which separates it from advancing civilization is closed with a violence that destroys its identity.
An unstable government is a standing menace to all neighboring governments. It is the rottenness of Turkey, more than the cupidity of the powers, that constantly endangers the peace of Europe. It was the rottenness of Spanish colonial administration and not our own cupidity, that brought on the Spanish war. It is the turbulence of the South American republics rather than their weakness, that in spite of the protection of the Monroe doctrine may yet invite European intervention. The culpability of the incompetent powers is a theme we hear much less about than the “rapacity” of the “harpy powers”—and why? Because of that childish tendency to take the part of the “under dog”, no matter whose the fault.
It would seem a necessary conclusion, therefore, that whenever a people demonstrates its incapacity to learn self-government by its own unaided effort, or whenever from any cause its civilization is far in the rear of the times, that the best interests both of itself and of the rest of humanity demand that it be placed under a governmental pedagogue, at least until it attains its majority. And this is no less true though the people rebel and many lives be lost, provided that it means progress for the race—“the greatest good to the greatest number”. Who would claim that Egypt would be better off without the wise guidance of England, or who now counts the lives that were lost in India in the establishment of her beneficent reign?
Hence, not all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, for this sublime statement of the Declaration applies to those only who are fit for self-government. We hold it now as we always have held it, a governmental ideal which we mean to realize; for in practice we never have followed it in our dealings with the Indians, and we never made a greater mistake than in following it too literally in the days of “reconstruction”.