The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is
this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race. It
is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went
before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of
Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor,
had on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe.
More than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the
mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During
that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand
comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European
advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of
European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the
islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia.
Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest
is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much of it
represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the
intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the
conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law,
culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood.
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