riers have ceased to be manned--forsaken or
neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors
has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation
and to the decay of warlike habits.

Nevertheless, even under such conditions,--which obtained increasingly
during the decline of the Roman Empire,--positions suitably chosen,
frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retard and, by gaining
time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the
general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense
importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is,
and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is
the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations
to-day. Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts
of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will
permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go
down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future
brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired
and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to
this day.

Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance
call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has
already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too
soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world
in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of
families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears,
are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat
and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual
activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of
the world as in the political development and material prosperity
which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in
commerce and in war. To these energies the mechanical and scientific
acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means
whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in
material well-being existing between those within its borders and
those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the
same advantages. And along with this preeminence in wealth arises the
cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the
world, were already run, and the goal of universal p