few centuries ago the world,
as known and studied, was a corner of the Levant, with its slender and
simple apparatus of life, social, political and industrial. Later,
its boundaries were extended over the remaining shores of the same
landlocked sea. Again a step, but not an expansion, and it looked
helplessly west upon the Atlantic: its ancient domain of the East
almost forgotten. Then that long gaze was gratified, and Cathay
was seen. With that came actual expansion, which continued in both
directions of the globe's circuit until now. At length the world of
thought, of inquiry and of common interest is becoming coincident with
the sphere.

In the direction of international politics progress during the century
has not kept pace with the advance in other walks. We are accustomed
to speak of Europe as forming a republic of nations, but that cannot
be said with much more truth than it could have been in the middle
of the sixteenth century. A sense of the value to the peace of the
continent of a balance of power was then recognized; and the object
was attained in some measure as soon as the career of Charles V.,
which had inculcated the lesson, admitted at his abdication of an
application of it. Treaties were then framed, as they have been
constantly since, for this purpose, and the observation of them was
perhaps as faithful. The passions of nations, like those of men,
furnish reason with its slowest and latest conquests. The great wars
of the French Revolution, and the short and sharp ones which have,
after an indispensable breathing-spell, recently followed it, were as
causeless and as defiant of the compacts designed to prevent them as
those of the Reformation period or of the Thirty Years. They were so
many confessions that an efficient international code is one of the
inventions for which we must look to the future. It is something,
meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion
of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom,
the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent
flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an
end. The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, France and Italy
have been within a few generations absorbed into three masses--so many
police districts which have proved tolerably effective in keeping
the peace within the large territories they cover. The nations, thus
massing themselves for exterior defence, an