THE RIGHTS OF BARBARIC PEOPLES.
WRITING in a recent number of the Outlook, Dr. Lyman Abbott gives expression to this sentiment: “I deny the right of a barbaric people to retain possession of any quarter of the globe. What I have ‘already said I affirm: barbarism has no rights which ‘civilization is bound to respect.’” This sentiment which Dr. Abbott so unhesitatingly affirms has long been a conviction with nations, and is having an especial vogue in these days with those nations that esteem themselves the cream of civilization. Italy attempted to apply the principle to Abyssinia, and France, Germany, Britain, and Belgium have had greater success with their essays at the practical application of it to desirable regions of the Dark Continent. All the great powers of the world have shown their belief in this principle during the recent troubles in China, and the only thing that has prevented the partition of the Celestial Empire among the allies has been the jealousy and distrust of one another’s motives with which every move or suggestion looking to the eagerly-desired division has been viewed. If Dr. Abbott’s maxim be regarded, then in it consists a threat against the ownership of land by any people on earth. If barbaric people have no right to territory, then the first step, and the only necessary moral argument, to deprive any people of their country is the proof, or rather the assumption, that they are barbaric. If this principle of morality is just in reference to nations, why may it not furnish a basis for a code of morality which shall also apply to individuals and to property rights? How much more civilized and more cultured it would be for trust barons and monopoly lords, modern captains of industry, to found their achievements, not upon might,—their power to act free from danger of competition, which is after all but a kind of brute force,—but rather to defend and justify their methods by the higher level of culture upon which they stand,—the protection they give to art, the encouragement to literature, and the magnificent endowment to universities. But already there is an echo from the future of the justification of modern means of acquiring wealth from the modern method of employing it when so acquired.—Catholic Mirror.