African and European Addresses

by Theodore Roosevelt

With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard and fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture—especially cathedral architecture—and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.

During this period there were several very important extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any European influence.

Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction—Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.

At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement towards a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and after these two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as varied as it is striking.

In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa and in much of tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan's growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

There are of course many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world's surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in action and reaction, and in inter-action, among themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.

Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or St. Petersburg, Rome or London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Aires; but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life insurance for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the laboratories of Tokyo, just as he must know the details of that practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying Socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before.

So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.

The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A.D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 A.D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been—sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this University was founded, the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your University to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern life.

Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children's children, or their children's children, shall dwell in an ironless age—and, later on, in an age without coal—and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the human race.