The twentieth century

The twentieth century is imagined in this passage not as a neutral span of time but as the horizon of an imperial prophecy: Anglo-Saxon power will supposedly police the world into peace, with the United States poised to dominate by the century’s end. The forecast turns military conquest into a story of benevolent progress, while Harry Astley’s objections reveal that its certainty depends on assumptions the passage does not settle.

A Century Imagined as a Deadline

The speaker presents the twentieth century as the culmination of an expansion already under way. Britain, described as the Anglo-Saxon power’s small island base, is said to have conquered more than a quarter of the planet in a little over two centuries. Across the Atlantic, the United States is depicted as a larger power only beginning to stretch its strength; the speaker predicts that it will dominate the rest of the planet before the century ends.

That forecast makes the century a measure of imperial time: conquest is not treated as an exceptional episode but as an unfinished process expected to continue until the world has been remade. The speaker allows that another century of fighting may be needed before the world is finally “civilized,” setting a distant endpoint for the promised transformation.

Conquest Presented as Tutelage

The argument depends on the Anglo-Saxon civilizing mission: the speaker casts peoples outside the dominant group as children and conquest as the force that will supposedly teach them. In this account, military superiority—rifles, machine guns, ironclad warships, and discipline—makes victory inevitable, while the delay before universal reform is blamed on resistance by existing rulers.

The passage’s distinctions between warfare and policing sharpen the contradiction. The speaker insists that invasions, including the British invasion of Egypt, are not meant to hurt their subjects but to remove bullies and impose order. Violence is thus renamed as instruction, and imperial control becomes the stated precondition for the peace and prosperity promised by the year 2000. The prediction ends by invoking the meek inheriting the earth, placing a religious promise of justice at the conclusion of an argument for armed domination.

Objections to the Forecast

Harry Astley does not accept the speaker’s confidence without qualification. He grants that the United States’ future dominance is possible, but makes it conditional: it depends on whether the subject peoples learn nothing from the Anglo-Saxons. He points to the Japanese as capable pupils and observes that Germany’s industrial strength has nearly caught up with Britain’s, bringing evidence of change into a speech that treats Anglo-Saxon supremacy as assured.

The speaker answers by insisting that pupils can never become masters, attributing that supposed limit to racial difference. He concedes that the German cranium is equal to his and Astley’s, then claims that it lacks flexibility. The exchange does not resolve whether the forecast will come true; instead, it exposes how the prediction protects itself from contrary evidence by turning competition into proof of an asserted hierarchy. The twentieth century therefore stands both as the promised destination of imperial rule and as a test whose outcome the passage leaves open.