Page 269 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

250 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

for us in our own garden, — all this is the work
of Caesar."
History at times reveals her foresight con-
crete in the action of a great individuality like
Caesars. More often her profounder move-
ments proceed from impulses whose origin and
motives cannot be traced, although a succes-
sion of steps may be discerned and their re-
stated. A
sults few names, for instance,
emerge amid the obscure movements of the
peoples which precipitated the outer peoples
upon the Roman Empire, but, with rare excep-
tions, they are simply exponents, pushed for-
ward and upward by the torrent ; at the
utmost guides, not controllers, of those whom

they represent but do not govern. It is much
the same now. The peoples of European civi-
lization, after a period of comparative repose,
are again advancing all along the line, to
occupy not only the desert places of the earth,
but the debatable grounds, the buffer terri-
tories, which hitherto have separated them
from those ancient nations, with whom they
now soon must stand face to face and border
to border. But who will say that this vast
general movement represents the thought,