Page 253 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

234 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

was merely the paid man. It is the nations
now that are in arms, and not simply the ser-
vants of the king.
In forecasting the future, then, it is upon
these particular signs of the times that I
dwell : the arrest of the forward impulse
towards political colonization which coincided
with the decade immediately preceding the
French Revolution ; the absorption of the
European nations, for the following quarter of
a century, with the universal wars, involving
questions chiefly political and European ; the
beginning of the great era of coal and iron, of
mechanical and industrial development, which
succeeded the peace, and during which it was
not aggressive colonization, but the develop-
ment of colonies already held and of new com-
mercial centres, notably in China and Japan,
that was the most prominent feature finally,
;
we have, resumed at the end of the century,
the forward movement of political colonization
by the mother countries, powerfully incited
thereto, doubtless, by the citizens of the old
colonies in different parts of the world. The
restlessness of Australia and the Cape Colony
has doubtless counted for much in British ad-