The international struggle for the control of the tropics has confronted all the Powers engaged in it with two historical developments admirably described by Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy in a recent work on The Basis of Ascendancy. Mr. Murphy is concerned mainly with the relations of North and South in the United States arising out of these developments, but the problem he states is inseparable from the association of Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics in the beneficial occupation of the tropics.

“First, there is the tendency towards inclusion, the movement of empire, the gradual incorporation of the weaker races and groups within the administrative federation of the stronger. Secondly, there is the movement of democracy, the tendency toward the broader distribution of the units of control. The stronger peoples are drawing into closer and closer relations with the weaker, and yet the terms under which these relations are established and expressed are invariably tinged and coloured by the democratic assumptions to which modern society is increasingly committed. The movement of empire is indeed modifying certain of our older notions of democracy, correcting some of our doctrinaire conceptions as to the natural equality of men; but the movement of democracy is modifying even more deeply some of our older notions of empire, is correcting the legal presumptions of inequality, is enforcing the conception of the equality of rights before the law, is impressing the fact of the social responsibility of the strong, is discouraging and slowly arresting the destructive policies of exploitation, and everywhere commending the redemptive and constructive policies of equity, order and education.