Watched nearby, while the fight stamps to and fro, the doers and the
deeds stand out naked and ugly. We see all too clearly the blood and
sweat, the craft and dunning and blind luck, the raw cruelty and
stupidity, the shortcomings of heart and hand, the mad abuse of victory.
Strands of meanness and cowardice are everywhere shot through the warp
of lofty and generous daring. There are failures bitter and shameful
side by side with feats of triumphant prowess. Of those who venture in
the contest some achieve success; others strive feebly and fail ignobly.

Only a Mighty Race Fit for the Trial.

If a race is weak, if it is lacking in the physical and moral traits
which go to the makeup of a conquering people, it cannot succeed. For
three hundred years the Portuguese possessed footholds in South Africa;
but they left to the English and Dutch the task of building free
communities able to hold in fact as well as in name the country south of
the Zambesi. Temperate South America is as fertile and healthy for the
white man as temperate North America, and is so much less in extent as
to offer a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; yet the
Spaniard, who came to the Plata two centuries before the American
backwoodsman reached the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in
a decade as his northern rival did in a year.

The task must be given the race just at the time when it is ready for
the undertaking. The whole future of the world would have been changed
had the period of trans-oceanic expansion among the nations of Europe
begun at a time when the Scandinavians or Germans were foremost in
sea-trade and sea-war; if it had begun when the fleets of the Norsemen
at the threatened all coasts, or when the Hanseatic league was in its
prime.

No race can Succeed Save at the Right Moment.

But in the actual event the days of Scandinavian supremacy at sea
resulted in no spread of the Scandinavian tongue or culture; and the
temporary maritime prosperity of the North German cities bore no
permanent fruit of conquest for the German people. The only nations that
profited by the expansion beyond the seas, and that built up in alien
continents vast commonwealths with the law, the language, the creed, and
the culture, no less than the blood, of the parent stocks, were those
that during the centuries of expansion, possessed power on the
ocean,--Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and, above all, England.

Interest