e popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such
countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the
faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In
democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles
to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is
that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use
of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. [Greek:
Arete],'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the
hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in
democracies as a matter of course. Of [Greek: arete] a moderate
quantity [Greek: hoposonoun] would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this
was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their [Greek:
arete] did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the
Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.

From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among
them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took
possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our
great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the
liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original
Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own
fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our
then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black
servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and
sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists
prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of
which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit
of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime;
we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described
it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could
compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we
had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to
create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had
other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade
would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been
dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they
ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own
resources