ung to the winds the loftier ideals it
once pursued so successfully and has lost its fine aesthetic perceptions,
its insight into the most delicate secrets of the soul.[145] And while
Japan, certainly to-day voicing the aspirations of the East, is
concerned to become a great military and industrial power, we in the
West are growing weary of war, and are coming to look upon commerce as a
necessary routine no longer adequate to satisfy the best energies of
human beings. We are here moving towards the fine quiescence involved by
a delicate equipoise of life and of death; and this economy sets free an
energy we are seeking to expend in a juster social organization, and in
the realization of ideals which until now have seemed but the
imagination of idle dreamers. Asia, as an anonymous writer has recently
put it, is growing crude, vulgar, and materialistic; Europe, on the
other hand, is growing to loathe its own past grossness. "London may yet
be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia--rich in all that gold
can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways
and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material
glories--postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the
possession of all that matters,"[146] Certainly, we are not there yet, but
the old Earth has seen many stranger and more revolutionary changes than
this. England, as this writer reminds us, was once a tropical forest.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] It must be understood that, from the present point of view, the term
"Anglo-Saxon" covers the peoples of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as
well as of England.

[91] The decline of the French birth-rate has been investigated in a
Lyons thesis by Salvat, _La Depopulation de la France_, 1903.

[92] The latest figures are given in the Annual Reports of the
Registrar-General for England and Wales.

[93] Newsholme and Stevenson, "Decline of Human Fertility as shown by
corrected Birth-rates," _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_,
1906.

[94] Werner Sombart, _International Magazine_, December, 1907.

[95] A.W. Flux, "Urban Vital Statistics in England and Germany," _Journ.
Statist. Soc._, March, 1910.

[96] German infantile mortality, Boehmert states ("Die
Saeuglingssterblichkeit in Deutschland und ihre Ursachen," _Die Neue
Generation_, March, 1908), is greater than in any European country,
except Russia and Hungary, about 50 per cent greater than in England,
France, Belg