If the coming world must strive with this question, or
abandon the "democratic ideal," the future promises to be stormy.
But even assuming that this problem of individual competition be overcome,
we are as far as ever from creating a system of moral law which shall
avail us, for we at once come in conflict with the principle of abstract
justice which demands that free men shall be permitted to colonize or move
where they will. But supposing England and America to amalgamate; they now
hold or assume to control all or nearly all the vacant regions of the
earth which are suited to the white man's habitation. And the white man
cannot live and farm his land in competition with the Asiatic; that was
conclusively proved in the days of Rome.
But it is not imaginable that Asiatics will submit to this discrimination
in silence. Nothing can probably constrain them to resignation but force,
and to apply force is to revert to the old argument of the savage or the
despot, who admits that he knows no law save that of the stronger, which
is the system, however much we have disguised it and, in short, lied about
it, under which we have lived and under which our ancestors have lived
ever since the family was organized, and under which it is probable that
we shall continue to live as long as any remnant of civilization shall
survive.
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