vents further afield
which carried on the State-building process to lands as yet chaotic or
ill-organised. There, at least, we may chronicle some advance, hampered
though it has been by the moral languor or laxity that has warped the
action of Europeans in their new spheres.

The transference of human interest from European history to that of Asia
and Africa is certainly one of the distinguishing features of the years
in question. The scene of great events shifts from the Rhine and the
Danube to the Oxus and the Nile. The affairs of Rome, Alsace, and
Bulgaria being settled for the present, the passions of great nations
centre on Herat and Candahar, Alexandria and Khartum, the Cameroons,
Zanzibar, and Johannesburg, Port Arthur and Korea. The United States,
after recovering from the Civil War and completing their work of
internal development, enter the lists as a colonising Power, and drive
forth Spain from two of her historic possessions. Strife becomes keen
over the islands of the Pacific. Australia seeks to lay hands on New
Guinea, and the European Powers enter into hot discussions over
Madagascar, the Carolines, Samoa, and many other isles.

In short, these years saw a repetition of the colonial strifes that
marked the latter half of the eighteenth century. Just as Europe, after
solving the questions arising out of the religious wars, betook itself
to marketing in the waste lands over the seas, so too, when the impulses
arising from the incoming of the principles of democracy and nationality
had worn themselves out, the commercial and colonial motive again came
uppermost. And, as in the eighteenth century, so too after 1880 there
was at hand an economic incentive spurring on the Powers to annexation
of new lands. France had recurred to protective tariffs in 1870.
Germany, under Bismarck, followed suit ten years later; and all the
continental Powers in turn, oppressed by armaments and girt around with
hostile tariffs, turned instinctively to the unclaimed territories
oversea as life-saving annexes for their own overstocked
industrial centres.

* * * * *

It will be convenient to begin the recital of extra-European events by
considering the expansion of Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia.
There, it is true, the commercial motive is less prominent than that of
political rivalry; and the foregoing remarks apply rather to the recent
history of Africa than to that of Central Asia. Bu