ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won afar.  England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all comers the right to the world’s waste spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.

Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own borders had grown incurable.  What is true of your country, my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies.  Free peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves.  We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery.  You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical democrat—­as, for the matter of that, I am—­and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.  But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think soundly.  The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is the instrument, the tool, with which we work.  It is important to have a good tool.  But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.  No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that wields it.  A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman; but a good tool in bad hands is no better.  In the last analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the future.  Is our time of growth drawing to an end?  Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of life?  None can tell.  Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good and for evil.  The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy.  The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of the civilized nations of Central and Western Europe, of America and Australia; a diminution so great that if it continues for the next century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years, all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward.