A MODERN UTOPIA
some striking wholesale undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and then disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question into which we need not now penetrate.
That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not, however, widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of confidence in the public imagination. But we have a very audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which distinguishes its own race—there is a German, a British, and an Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which embraces the whole "white race" in one remarkable tolerance—as the superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves, collectively if not individually; and the exponents of this doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's "Control of the Tropics." The whole world is to be administered by the "white" Powers—Mr. Kidd did not anticipate Japan—who will see to it that their subjects do not "prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they have in charge." Those other races are to be regarded as children, recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender emotions of paternity.
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