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Page 41
It appears a convenient, though doubtless very rough, way of prefacing
this subject to say that the huge colonizing movements of the
eighteenth century were brought to a pause by the American Revolution,
which deprived Great Britain of her richest colonies, succeeded, as
that almost immediately was, by the French Revolution and the
devastating wars of the republic and of Napoleon, which forced the
attention of Europe to withdraw from external allurements and to
concentrate upon its own internal affairs. The purchase of Louisiana
by the United States at the opening of the current century emphasized
this conclusion; for it practically eliminated the continent of North
America from the catalogue of wild territories available for foreign
settlement. Within a decade this was succeeded by the revolt of the
Spanish colonies, followed later by the pronouncements of President
Monroe and of Mr. Canning, which assured their independence by
preventing European interference. The firmness with which the position
of the former statesman has been maintained ever since by the great
body of the people of the United States, and the developments his
doctrine afterwards received, have removed the Spanish-American
countries equally from all probable chance of further European
colonization, in the political sense of the word.
Thus the century opened. Men's energies still sought scope beyond the
sea, doubtless; not, however, in the main, for the founding of new
colonies, but for utilizing ground already in political occupation.
Even this, however, was subsidiary. The great work of the nineteenth
century, from nearly its beginning to nearly its close, has been in
the recognition and study of the forces of nature, and the application
of them to the purposes of mechanical and economical advance. The
means thus placed in men's hands, so startling when first invented, so
familiar for the most part to us now, were devoted necessarily, first,
to the development of the resources of each country. Everywhere there
was a fresh field; for hitherto it had been nowhere possible to man
fully to utilize the gifts of nature. Energies everywhere turned
inward, for there, in every region, was more than enough to do.
Naturally, therefore, such a period has been in the main one of peace.
There have been great wars, certainly; but, nevertheless, external
peace has been the general characteristic of that period of
development, during which men have been occupied in revolutionizing
the face of their own countries by means of the new powers at their
disposal.
All such phases pass, however, as does every human thing. Increase of
production--the idol of the economist--sought fresh markets, as might
have been predicted. The increase of home consumption, through
increased ease of living, increased wealth, increased population, did
not keep up with the increase of forth-putting and the facility of
distribution afforded by steam. In the middle of the century China and
Japan were forced out of the seclusion of ages, and were compelled,
for commercial purposes at least, to enter into relations with the
European communities, to buy and to sell with them. Serious attempts,
on any extensive scale, to acquire new political possessions abroad
largely ceased. Commerce only sought new footholds, sure that, given
the inch, she in the end would have the ell. Moreover, the growth of
the United States in population and resources, and the development of
the British Australian colonies, contributed to meet the demand, of
which the opening of China and Japan was only a single indication.
That opening, therefore, was rather an incident of the general
industrial development which followed upon the improvement of
mechanical processes and the multiplication of communications.
Thus the century passed its meridian, and began to decline towards its
close. There were wars and there were rumors of wars in the countries
of European civilization. Dynasties rose and fell, and nations shifted
their places in the scale of political importance, as old-time boys in
school went up and down; but, withal, the main characteristic abode,
and has become more and more the dominant prepossession of the
statesmen who reached their prime at or soon after the times when the
century itself culminated. The maintenance of a _status quo_, for
purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually
become an ideal--the _quieta non movere_ of Sir Robert Walpole. The
ideal is respectable, certainly; in view of the concert of the powers,
in the interest of their own repose, to coerce Greece and the Cretans,
we may perhaps refrain from calling it noble. The question remains,
how long can it continue respectable in the sense of being practicable
of realization,--a rational possibility, not an idle dream? Many are
now found to say--and among them some of the most bitter of the
advocates of universal peace, who are among the bitterest of modern
disputants--that when the Czar Nicholas proposed to move the quiet
things, half a century ago, and to reconstruct the political map of
southeastern Europe in the interest of well-founded quiet, it was he
that showed the idealism of rational statesmanship,--the only truly
practical statesmanship,--while the defenders of the _status quo_
evinced the crude instincts of the mere time-serving politician. That
the latter did not insure quiet, even the quiet of desolation, in
those unhappy regions, we have yearly evidence. How far is it now a
practicable object, among the nations of the European family, to
continue indefinitely the present realization of peace and plenty,--in
themselves good things, but which are advocated largely on the ground
that man lives by bread alone,--in view of the changed conditions of
the world which the departing nineteenth century leaves with us as its
bequest? Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its
benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the
clamor for which rises ominously--the word is used advisedly--among
our latter-day cries? None shares more heartily than the writer the
aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into
ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European
civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to
relax into an artificial peace, resting not upon the working of
national consciences, as questions arise, but upon a Permanent
Tribunal,--an external, if self-imposed authority,--the realization in
modern policy of the ideal of the medi�val Papacy?
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