goal. The reason for this
fact seems to be that the human race, like the individual, is subject to
certain alternating moods which may be termed the enthusiastic and the
practical; and that, during the latter phase, the material needs of life
are so far exalted at the expense of the higher impulses that small
struggling communities receive not a tithe of the sympathy which they
would have aroused in more generous times.

The fact need not beget despair. On the contrary, it should inspire the
belief that, when the fit passes away, the healthier, nobler mood will
once more come; and then the world will pulsate with new life, making
wholesome use of the wealth previously stored up but not assimilated. It
is significant that Gervinus, writing in 1853, spoke of that epoch as
showing signs of disenchantment and exhaustion in the political sphere.
In reality he was but six years removed from the beginning of an age of
constructive activity the like of which has never been seen.

Further, we may point out that the ebb in the tide of human affairs
which set in about the year 1885 was due to specific causes operating
with varied force on different peoples. First in point of time, at the
close of the year 1879, came the decision of Bismarck and of the German
Reichstag to abandon the cause of Free Trade in favour of a narrow
commercial nationalism. Next came the murder of the Czar Alexander II.
(March 1881), and the grinding down of the reformers and of all alien
elements by his stern successor. Thus, the national impulse, which had
helped on that of democracy in the previous generation, now lent its
strength to the cause of economic, religious, and political reaction in
the two greatest of European States.

In other lands that vital force frittered itself away in the frothy
rhetoric of Deroulede and the futile prancings of Boulanger, in the
gibberings of _Italia Irredenta_, or in the noisy obstruction of Czechs
and Parnellites in the Parliaments of Vienna and London. Everything
proclaimed that the national principle had spent its force and could now
merely turn and wobble until it came to rest.

A curious series of events also served to discredit the party of
progress in the constitutional States. Italian politics during the
ascendancy of Depretis, Mancini, and Crispi became on the one side a
mere scramble for power, on the other a nervous edging away from the
gulf of bankruptcy ever yawning in front. France, too, was slow to