iles us to war as the delineations of humanity under
"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,
states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such
attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the
ordinances of the world.

Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.
Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]

Nor does this result in the mood of Candide. The effort unconquered
and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it
is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in
very truth it is.

Thus we are prepared to consider the following question. Given that
death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will
this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall? Will the form
it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of
Akbar, have passed away? The question resolves itself into two
parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist? And,
secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or
gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to
determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or
Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?

Sec.1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

First of all with regard to the former question. Recent studies in
ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies
of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not
the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of
recently civilized races. Yet this assumption still underlies much of
the current speculation on the subject. Last century it was received
as an axiomatic truth. Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic
interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in
them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. Not only
Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,
as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.
Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their
customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _litterateurs_
indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi
they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document
lasting as the _Germania_. Such comparisons a