" The
way in which the mandatories and the mandated conceive that time will
influence deeply their relations. Thus in the case of Cuba the
judgment of the American government virtually coincided with that of
the Cuban patriots, and though there has been trouble, there is no
finer page in the history of how strong powers have dealt with the
weak. Oftener in that history the estimates have not coincided. Where
the imperial people, whatever its public expressions, has been deeply
convinced that the backwardness of the backward was so hopeless as not
to be worth remedying, or so profitable that it was not desirable to
remedy it, the tie has festered and poisoned the peace of the world.
There have been a few cases, very few, where backwardness has meant to
the ruling power the need for a program of forwardness, a program with
definite standards and definite estimates of time. Far more
frequently, so frequently in fact as to seem the rule, backwardness
has been conceived as an intrinsic and eternal mark of inferiority.
And then every attempt to be less backward has been frowned upon as
the sedition, which, under these conditions, it undoubtedly is. In our
own race wars we can see some of the results of the failure to realize
that time would gradually obliterate the slave morality of the Negro,
and that social adjustment based on this morality would begin to break
down.
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