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And now, nearly forty years later, is not this what we hear?. Arewe not being told that it is our high destiny to regenerate the world,to administer savage and senile peoples? Senator Beveridge was liberalenough to include the Teutonic along with the Anglo-Saxon peoplesas the "master organizers of the world." Now, of course, the Teutonicpeoples are ousted from the great fraternity of the masterrace and we alone—with our junior partners, the British—claim thatproud distinction. We have been chosen by God to establish systemwhere chaos reigns, to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughoutthe world. We are the trustees of the world's progress and theguardians of its righteous peace—the "we" referring to the Anglo-American peoples, since our former partners, the Teutons, have beendiscovered to be criminals for holding these same views though, ofcourse, some of our most generous-souled commentators are willingto acquit them on the plea of insanity. But "we" Americans, aboveall, are chosen as God's missionaries to bring freedom and civilizationand three square meals a day to all lands everywhere. What Beveridgeand his colleagues were talking about were those first feeble steps ofours in the direction of American imperial destiny. Beveridge saidprophetically that our first century was taken up with selfgovernmentand that the development and administration of otherlands will be the dominant note of our second century. Now Mr.Henry Luce, who probably never read this Beveridge speech, bobsup with the glorious evangel and gives to this century its propername—the American Century.Nothing could be further from the truth than to suppose thatthese ideas spring up in the minds of only wicked people. And nothingcould be more dangerous than to imagine that these fatal illusionscannot be generated here among men and women who in allthe relations of life appear to us as good human beings and goodcitizens and who can, yet, nourish a philosophy that is not one whitdifferent from that which has driven European aggressors along theircareers of cruelty and disaster.Of course these ideas may be conveyed in the soft, scholarly termsof high religious duty by a scholar like Ruskin or they may beshouted at us in the raucous tones of Hitler in the Sportþalast. Whenwe announce our racial mastery and our intention to use this high221