through the incapacity or negligence of those who dwell therein, the incompetent race or system will go down, as the inferior race ever has fallen back and disappeared before the persistent impact of the superior.  The recent and familiar instance of Egypt is entirely in point.  The continuance of the existing system—­if it can be called such—­had become impossible, not because of the native Egyptians, who had endured the like for ages, but because there were involved therein the interests of several European states, of which two principally were concerned by present material interest and traditional rivalry.  Of these one, and that the one most directly affected, refused to take part in the proposed interference, with the result that this was not abandoned, but carried out solely by the other, which remains in political and administrative control of the country.  Whether the original enterprise or the continued presence of Great Britain in Egypt is entirely clear of technical wrongs, open to the criticism of the pure moralist, is as little to the point as the morality of an earthquake; the general action was justified by broad considerations of moral expediency, being to the benefit of the world at large, and of the people of Egypt in particular—­however they might have voted in the matter.

But what is chiefly instructive in this occurrence is the inevitableness, which it shares in common with the great majority of cases where civilized and highly organized peoples have trespassed upon the technical rights of possession of the previous occupants of the land—­of which our own dealings with the American Indian afford another example.  The inalienable rights of the individual are entitled to a respect which they unfortunately do not always get; but there is no inalienable right in any community to control the use of a region when it does so to the detriment of the world at large, of its neighbors in particular, or even at times of its own subjects.  Witness, for example, the present angry resistance of the Arabs at Jiddah to the remedying of a condition of things which threatens to propagate a deadly disease far and wide, beyond the locality by which it is engendered; or consider the horrible conditions under which the Armenian subjects of Turkey have lived and are living.  When such conditions obtain, they can be prolonged only by the general indifference or mutual jealousies of the other peoples concerned—­as in the instance of Turkey—­or because there is sufficient force to perpetuate the misrule, in which case the right is inalienable only until its misuse brings ruin, or until a stronger force appears to dispossess it.  It is because so much of the world still remains in the possession of the savage, or of states whose imperfect development, political or economical, does not enable them to realize for the general use nearly the result of which the territory is capable, while at the same time the redundant energies of civilized states, both government and peoples, are finding lack of openings and scantiness of livelihood at home, that there now obtains a condition of aggressive restlessness with which all have to reckon.