Ninety-five years ago, replying to the English historian Charles H. Pearson’s pessimistic National Life and Character: A Forecast, Theodore Roosevelt, the arch-optimist, wrote:
The Greek rulers of Bactria were ultimately absorbed and vanished, as probably the English rulers of India will someday in the future . . . themselves be absorbed and vanish. In Africa south of the Zambesi . . . there may remain white States, although even these States will surely contain a large colored population, always threatening to swamp the whites. … It is almost impossible that they will not in the end succeed in throwing off the yoke of the European outsiders, though this end may be, and we hope it will be, many centuries distant. . . . it is impossible for the dominant races of the temperate zones ever bodily to displace the people of the tropics.
Comments