"Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States, will assert itself"
About this Quote
A prediction of outward expansion comes wrapped in the language of demographics, race, and destiny. The phrase "thousand millions" is an older way of saying a billion, and the sentence argues that long before such numbers accumulate, a restless force will push outward. "Centrifugal" supplies the metaphor: not consolidation at the center but dispersion, migration, and projection of power. "This stock" points to what Josiah Strong called the Anglo-Saxon race, which he believed possessed traits suited to leadership in the modern world. He claimed that the United States, with its frontier ethos, mobility, entrepreneurial energy, and Protestant culture, had intensified those traits.
The line comes from Strong’s 1885 book Our Country, a Social Gospel tract that fused evangelical reform with a racialized confidence in American mission. He saw enormous population growth on the horizon, but he insisted that ideas, institutions, and peoples would radiate outward well before any numerical tipping point. Commerce, missions, technology, and migration would carry Americanized Anglo-Saxon norms across continents. He turned expansion into an almost physical law, a moralized physics in which Providence and character drive the outward spin.
The sentence also discloses the tensions of its age. Strong was anxious about immigration, Catholic influence, urban poverty, and the fragility of republican virtue, yet he answered those anxieties with a call to evangelize and Americanize at scale. That vision helped rationalize the coming surge of overseas ambitions, from missionary networks in Asia to the political assertiveness that culminated in the Spanish-American War. By casting expansion as an inherent tendency, he made policy look like inevitability.
Read now, the language of "stock" exposes the hierarchy beneath the uplift. The promise of spreading liberty and faith rides alongside exclusionary assumptions about who counts as civilizationally fit. The sentence captures a moment when religious idealism, social Darwinist coloration, and national self-confidence converged, and it shows how a metaphor of centrifugal motion could turn cultural prejudice into a story of historical necessity.
The line comes from Strong’s 1885 book Our Country, a Social Gospel tract that fused evangelical reform with a racialized confidence in American mission. He saw enormous population growth on the horizon, but he insisted that ideas, institutions, and peoples would radiate outward well before any numerical tipping point. Commerce, missions, technology, and migration would carry Americanized Anglo-Saxon norms across continents. He turned expansion into an almost physical law, a moralized physics in which Providence and character drive the outward spin.
The sentence also discloses the tensions of its age. Strong was anxious about immigration, Catholic influence, urban poverty, and the fragility of republican virtue, yet he answered those anxieties with a call to evangelize and Americanize at scale. That vision helped rationalize the coming surge of overseas ambitions, from missionary networks in Asia to the political assertiveness that culminated in the Spanish-American War. By casting expansion as an inherent tendency, he made policy look like inevitability.
Read now, the language of "stock" exposes the hierarchy beneath the uplift. The promise of spreading liberty and faith rides alongside exclusionary assumptions about who counts as civilizationally fit. The sentence captures a moment when religious idealism, social Darwinist coloration, and national self-confidence converged, and it shows how a metaphor of centrifugal motion could turn cultural prejudice into a story of historical necessity.
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