f barbarism or of an outworn tyranny,
whether the conflict be fought by the Russian heralds of civilization in
Turkestan, by the English champion of the higher life in the Eastern
world, or by the men who upheld the Stars and Stripes as they freed the
people of the tropic islands of the sea from the mediaeval tyranny of
Spain.

I do not ask that you look at this policy from a merely national
standpoint, although if you are good Americans you must look from the
national standpoint first. I ask that you look at it from the standpoint
of civilization, from the standpoint of righteousness, and realize that
it is better for the men who are as yet ages behind us in the struggle
upward that they be helped upward, and that it does not cease to be
better for them, merely because it is better for us also. As I say, cast
aside the selfish view. Consider whether or not it is better that the
brutal barbarism of northern Asia should be supplanted by the
civilization of Russia, which has not yet risen to what we of the
Occident are proud to claim as our standard, but which, as it stands, is
tens of centuries in advance of that of the races it supplants. Again,
from the standpoint of the outsider, look at the improvement worked by
the Englishmen in all the islands of the sea and all the places on the
dark continents where the British flag has been planted; seriously
consider the enormous, the incalculable betterment that comes at this
moment to ninety-five per cent. of the people who have been cowering
under the inconceivably inhuman rule of Mahdism in the Sudan because it
has been supplanted by the reign of law and of justice. I ask you to
read the accounts of the Catholic missionary priests, the Austrian
priests who suffered under Mahdism, to read in their words what they
have suffered under conditions that have gone back to the stone age in
the middle of the nineteenth century. Then you will realize that the
Sirdar and his troops were fighting the battle of righteousness as truly
as ever it was fought by your ancestors and mine two or three or four
centuries ago.

I think you can now understand that I admire what other nations have
done in this regard, and, therefore, that you will believe that I speak
with sincerity when I speak of what we ourselves have done. Thank heaven
that we of this generation, to whom was denied the chance of taking part
in the greatest struggle for righteousness that this century has seen,
the great Civil