idual must be for the good not of the next generation but perchance
of the fourth or fifth in line of descent. The Frenchman and the
Hollander of the seventeenth century could not even dimly see the
possibilities that loomed vast and vague in the colonization of America
and Australia; they did not have, and it was hardly possible that they
should have, the remotest idea that it would be well for them to
surrender, one the glory gained by his German conquests, the other the
riches reaped from his East Indian trade, in order that three hundred
years later huge unknown continents should be filled with French and
Dutch commonwealths. No nation, taken as a whole, can ever see so far
into the future; no nation, even if it could see such a future, would
ever sacrifice so much to win it. Hitherto each race in turn has
expanded only because the interests of a certain number of individuals
of many succeeding generations have made them active and vigorous agents
in the work of expansion.

This Indifference as Marked in New as in Old Communities.

This indifference on the part of individuals to the growth of the race
is often nearly as marked in new as in old communities, although the
very existence of these new communities depends upon that growth. It is
strange to see now the new settlers in the new land tend to turn their
faces, not towards the world before them, but towards the world they
have left behind. Many of them, perhaps most, wish rather to take parts
in the struggles of the old civilized powers, than to do their share in
laying the obscure but gigantic foundations of the empires of the
future. The New Englander who was not personally interested in the lands
beyond the Alleghanies often felt indifferent or hostile to the growth
of the trans-montane America; and in their turn these over-mountain men,
these Kentuckians and Tennesseans, were concerned to obtain a port at
the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the right to move westward to
the Pacific. There were more men in the new communities than in the old
who saw, however imperfectly, the grandeur of the opportunity and of the
race-destiny: but there were always very many who did their share in
working out their destiny grudgingly and under protest.

The Race Grows because its Interests Happen to be Identical with
those of the Individual.

The race as a whole, in its old homes and its new, learns the lesson
with such difficulty that it can scarcely be