Chapter XXI: Contact of Peoples

Consider, for instance, that at the beginning of our century, for the first time in more than fifteen hundred years, the Christian nations came into contact with a mighty pagan power, and were compelled to acknowledge it as not only a political, but a moral, equal. Whoever knows the magical effect in the quickening of intellectual and spiritual life due to new contact with a contrasting type of national culture will agree that the meeting thus of Christendom with the so-called "heathen" world is a fact of prime significance in the history of man.

Nor is it simply the contact of heathen and Christian on terms of moral equality. There is another aspect to Japan's ascendancy and her recognition by the West. The East and the West meet at last. The psychic invasion of each by the other must be epoch-making and in the direction of the completeness and unification spiritually of all mankind in a brotherhood of nations and nation-states. The new contact of heathen and Christian, and of white and colored, of East and West, means that the exploitation of the dark races by nations more highly organized on a basis of self-interest is about to cease forever. With the humanization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes who never divided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the "have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical universe.

Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many in Old England thought--that there is nothing new under the sun? Then I would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative political and social equality, of immigrants from some fifty-one different nations of the Old World. These people will mix their blood, their temperaments, and their traditions, and not only will a new variety of human being emerge, but the mixing of opposites in idea and temperament will quicken self-consciousness and heighten mental power and speed up its activity. The opportunity of the blond beasts of prey has lain in the torpor and inactivity and ignorance of the multitude. But I find no torpor in California. And where there is no one that will allow himself to be preyed upon, even blond beasts take up the new enterprise of co-operation among equals. This is an inevitable result of the contact of many varieties of unlikes, the unification, not of equals, but of supplementary equivalents. When such psychic conditions have prevailed for a century or more, it is inconceivable that trade can continue to consist of competition between individuals and the permission of the successful to amass and hoard fortunes. Either production and distribution will become communal, or the community will tax large fortunes into the state and national treasury.

But there are three other distinguishing characteristics of the twentieth century which make for the replacing of civilization by humanization, and for the transition of trade from the harshness of the law into the abounding grace of the gospel.