The answer commonly given to this question is one quite flattering to American vanity. It is that we are drifting away from "parochial" things and taking our proper place as a great "world power." Having solved all the petty problems that have absorbed our thoughts and energies for a hundred years, we have gone forth to "take up the white man's burden," and to solve the greater problems that a discriminating Providence has so wisely confided to our ability and philanthropy. At the same time we are going to have our say as to how the affairs of the world outside of our narrow and cramping borders shall be managed. Mr. Roberts, however, does not appear to take any such pleasant view of the future. He has none of the blood of Don Quixote flowing in his veins. The bestowal of the blessings of a Christian civilization with machine guns upon breech-clouted savages has no attractions for him. He sees that we have made such a disgraceful failure of the management of the contemptible things in which we have been so ignobly absorbed that we are threatened with national decadence! "While the contests against unjust and oppressive taxation," he says in his report for 1899, "have been the contests of freedom and civil and religious liberty in the world, it must not be forgotten that unjust and burdensome taxation has been in all ages the most prolific cause of national decadence as well. There are nations in Europe, once great and prosperous," he adds, thus recalling the warnings of Lord Salisbury's famous speech on the same subject, "which to-day seem dying of dry rot because, to meet their immense expenses and to pay interest on their great bonded debts, taxation has been increased beyond the safe limit, and the very sources of national prosperity have been taxed so that they run dry, or send down a rill where it should be a river. Few national diseases are more dangerous or harder to cure than burdensome taxation. Can any one charged with the responsibility of making tax laws," he asks, profoundly stirred by the startling facts that have come under his observation, "afford to ignore the undoubted lessons of history or the manifest tendency of the times in the matter of revenue raising and expending?"