Something new must be found for them to do, some great unselfish task that they can do together.
Nobody can lead in such a new era but the United States.
May there not come such a chance in Mexico--to clean out bandits, yellow fever, malaria, hookworm--all to make the country healthful, safe for life and investment, and for orderly self-government at last?
What we did in Cuba might thus be made the beginning of a new epoch in history--conquest for the sole benefit of the conquered, worked out by a sanitary reformation.

The new sanitation will reclaim all tropical lands; but the work must be first done by military power--probably from the outside.
May not the existing military power of Europe conceivably be diverted, gradually, to this use?
One step at a time, as political and financial occasions arise?
As presently in Mexico?
This present order must change.

It holds the Old World still.

It keeps all parts of the world apart, in spite of the friendly cohesive forces of trade and travel.

It keeps back self-government and the progress of man.
And the tropics cry out for sanitation, which is at first an essentially military task.
A strange idea this may have seemed in August, 1913, a year before the outbreak of the European war; yet the scheme is not dissimilar to the "mandatory" principle, adopted by the Versailles Peace Conference as the only practical method of dealing with backward peoples.