ance to the possession of the area which it drained. Most
effective of all were the smuggling and piratical raids into the
reserved waters of West Africa and the West Indies, and later into the
innermost penetralia of the Pacific Ocean, which were undertaken with
rapidly increasing boldness by the navigators of all three nations, but
above all by the English. Drake is the supreme exponent of these
methods; and his career illustrates in the clearest fashion the steady
diminution of Spanish prestige under these attacks, and the growing
boldness and maritime skill of its attackers.

From the time of Drake's voyage round the world (1577) and its
insulting defiance of the Spanish power on the west coast of South
America, it became plain that the maintenance of Spanish monopoly could
not last much longer. It came to its end, finally and unmistakably, in
the defeat of the Grand Armada. That supreme victory threw the ocean
roads of trade open, not to the English only, but to the sailors of all
nations. In its first great triumph the English navy had established
the Freedom of the Seas, of which it has ever since been the chief
defender. Since 1588 no power has dreamt of claiming the exclusive
right of traversing any of the open seas of the world, as until that
date Spain and Portugal had claimed the exclusive right of using the
South Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans.

So ends the first period in the imperial expansion of the Western
peoples, the period of Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. Meanwhile,
unnoticed in the West, a remarkable eastward expansion was being
effected by the Russian people. By insensible stages they had passed
the unreal barrier between Europe and Asia, and spread themselves
thinly over the vast spaces of Siberia, subduing and assimilating the
few and scattered tribes whom they met; by the end of the seventeenth
century they had already reached the Pacific Ocean. It was a conquest
marked by no great struggles or victories, an insensible permeation of
half a continent. This process was made the easier for the Russians,
because in their own stock were blended elements of the Mongol race
which they found scattered over Siberia: they were only reversing the
process which Genghis Khan had so easily accomplished in the thirteenth
century. And as the Russians had scarcely yet begun to be affected by
Western civilisation, there was no great cleavage or contrast between
them and their new subjects, and t