In short, as far as America is concerned, Nature is on the side of Peace. I foresee five hundred years of prosperity and peace, after which, no doubt, America will weaken. The growth of the American Empire is the greatest fact in the world to-day—more significant than the decay of Europe. Russia, one must remember, is smashed, with her whole nation down on a gypsy level of culture. Germany prostrate under the heel of France nears the condition of Russia. France is self-centered and contented with a Mediterranean empire. Britain marks time. Alone America goes on. She stands now with her hundred million educated population, with her vast wealth and serried ranks of millionaires, with her unsurpassed technical equipment and industrial organization, and she has an enormous appetite for power and zest for life. The imagination ought to be given free play in thinking of the coming time.
Bearing in mind that America has finally and absolutely rejected Bolshevism, Communism, and all other disjectory theories of government, has, in fact, affirmed in absolute fashion the rights of property and her loyalty to the capitalistic system, one can almost forecast by mathematics the state of her wealth at any given date. What a stupendous aggregation of material splendor! If in the last sixty years America has risen from the Civil War level to what she is to-day, to what will she rise in sixty years from now? To what will she rise in six hundred years? The mind refuses to give the answer to the sum, but instead whispers the lines—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet
Lest we forget!
It is so easy to forget.
How the soul of America will fare in all this I have not sought to know. The soul abhorreth a golden treasure house, preferring greatly a humble and a loving heart. America is one thing not answerable to God. Americans will find themselves in America, as Romans found themselves in Rome. Individually, now as ever, and like the rest of us, they will have to find their personal way of Salvation.
One thing which the great World War seems to have revealed is that we are physically subject to forces over which we have little or no control. These forces are generally called economic, and are thought to be academic and theoretic. That is a mistake. They are elemental and primitive; Lloyd Georges and Wilsons do not divert them. On the contrary, they themselves sweep statesmen away when the time comes—and sweep other statesmen into power.
Such a force drives the American flag southward, and the cry is heard "Go South!"