age of them.

The War of 1914 decided the right of Great Britain to rule the Near East
as well as Southern Asia and the strategic points of Africa. In the
stripping of the vanquished and in the division of the spoils of war the
British lion proved to be the lion indeed. But the same forces that gave
the British the run of the Old World called into existence a rival in
the New.

People from Britain, Germany and the other countries of Northern Europe,
speaking the English language and fired with the conquering spirit of
the motherland, had been, for three centuries, taming the wilderness of
North America. They had found the task immense, but the rewards equally
great. When the forces of nature were once brought into subjection, and
the wilderness was inventoried, it proved to contain exactly those
stores that are needed for the success of modern civilization. With the
Indians brushed aside, and the Southwest conquered from Mexico, the new
ruling class of successful business men established itself, and the
matter of safeguarding property rights, of building industrial empires
and of laying up vast stores of capital and surplus followed as a matter
of course.

Europe, busy with her own affairs, paid little heed to the New World,
except to send to it some of her most rugged stock and much of her
surplus wealth. The New World, left to itself, pursued its way--in
isolation, and with an intensity proportioned to the size of the task in
hand and the richness of the reward.

The Spanish War in 1898 and the performance of the Canadians in the Boer
War of 1899 astounded the world, but it was the War of 1914 that really
waked the Europeans to the possibilities of the Western peoples. The
Canadians proved their worth to the British armies. The Americans showed
that they could produce prodigious amounts of the necessaries of war,
and when they did go in, they inaugurated a shipping program, raised and
dispatched troops, furnished supplies and provided funds to an extent
which, up to that time, was considered impossible. The years from 1914
to 1918 established the fact that there was, in the West, a colossus of
economic power.

2. _The New International Line-Up_

There are four major factors in the new international line-up. The first
is Russia; the second is the Japanese Empire; the third is the British
Empire and the fourth is the American Empire. Italy has neither the
resources, the wealth nor the population necessary to ma