We conclude by commending Miss Carter's article to the careful consideration of all who are interested in educational problems. She writes with a certain tinge of vexation, and, without meaning it, may have somewhat forced the case against her kindergarten children. The Atlantic Monthly deserves credit, we must add, for the many able and timely articles which it has lately been publishing on educational topics--articles stamped by the breadth of thought and high culture which are characteristic of our contemporary, and eminently adapted to assist in delivering our educational methods from bondage to a mechanical routine, and bringing them nearer to the simplicity and freedom of Nature.
Since the United States turned its ambition toward the tropics, the question as to whether its political institutions can be extended to the inhabitants there has been widely discussed. As might be expected, the philanthropic advocates of expansion have insisted that "the blessings of freedom and civilization" are not limited by latitude or longitude. Any other position would, of course, have involved them in the charge of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But certain philosophic expansionists, as they may be politely called, have taken the opposite view. "It is a cardinal fact," they say, quoting the language of a recent essay of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, "that in the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water.... Neither physically, morally, nor politically can he be acclimatized in the tropics." Still quoting his language, they say again that "a clearer insight into the laws that have shaped the course of human evolution must bring us to see that the process which has gradually developed the energy, enterprise, and social efficiency of the race northward, and which has left less richly endowed in this respect the people inhabiting the regions where the conditions of life are easiest, is no passing accident, nor the result of circumstances changeable at will, but part of the cosmic order of things which we have no power to alter."
Whether Mr. Kidd recognizes the odious significance of his captivating speculation or not, it is certainly a plea and an apology for slavery and political despotism in the tropics. Most welcome will it be to all those nations and people of easy conscience and measureless greed that now hold in bondage of greater or less intensity millions of the inhabitants of that rich and splendid region. But there is reason to believe that it must be relegated to the limbo of a kindred and popular superstition. Within the past year much has been said about the genius of the Anglo-Saxon for freedom and the ethnic incapacity of the Latins for that boon of civilization. Even so great a scholar as Guizot encourages this extraordinary theory. Again and again does he point out in his History of Civilization how the spirit of freedom may be traced to the Teutonic hordes that swarmed the forests of Germany. He does so despite the overwhelming evidence against him to be found in his own pages even. In apology for his misinterpretation of social phenomena there can be urged his ignorance of the law of evolution and of the hardly less important law of the militant origin of despotism and the pacific origin of freedom. No such apology can, however, be made in behalf of Mr. Kidd, or of any other apostle of imperialism. Not only have they at command all the generalizations of social science, but all the facts upon which those generalizations are based, to prove that neither climate nor race is a limitation upon freedom.