ing, increased wealth, increased population, did
not keep up with the increase of forth-putting and the facility of
distribution afforded by steam. In the middle of the century China and
Japan were forced out of the seclusion of ages, and were compelled,
for commercial purposes at least, to enter into relations with the
European communities, to buy and to sell with them. Serious attempts,
on any extensive scale, to acquire new political possessions abroad
largely ceased. Commerce only sought new footholds, sure that, given
the inch, she in the end would have the ell. Moreover, the growth of
the United States in population and resources, and the development of
the British Australian colonies, contributed to meet the demand, of
which the opening of China and Japan was only a single indication.
That opening, therefore, was rather an incident of the general
industrial development which followed upon the improvement of
mechanical processes and the multiplication of communications.

Thus the century passed its meridian, and began to decline towards its
close. There were wars and there were rumors of wars in the countries
of European civilization. Dynasties rose and fell, and nations shifted
their places in the scale of political importance, as old-time boys in
school went up and down; but, withal, the main characteristic abode,
and has become more and more the dominant prepossession of the
statesmen who reached their prime at or soon after the times when the
century itself culminated. The maintenance of a _status quo_, for
purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually
become an ideal--the _quieta non movere_ of Sir Robert Walpole. The
ideal is respectable, certainly; in view of the concert of the powers,
in the interest of their own repose, to coerce Greece and the Cretans,
we may perhaps refrain from calling it noble. The question remains,
how long can it continue respectable in the sense of being practicable
of realization,--a rational possibility, not an idle dream? Many are
now found to say--and among them some of the most bitter of the
advocates of universal peace, who are among the bitterest of modern
disputants--that when the Czar Nicholas proposed to move the quiet
things, half a century ago, and to reconstruct the political map of
southeastern Europe in the interest of well-founded quiet, it was he
that showed the idealism of rational statesmanship,--the only truly
practical statesmanship,--whi