Page 273 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

254 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

significance of the great outward movement
of the European nations to-day. Consciously
or unconsciously, they are advancing the out-
posts of our civilization, and accumulating
the line of defences which will permit it to
survive, or at the least will insure that it
shall not go down till it has leavened the
character of the world for a future brighter
even than its past, just as the Roman civiliza-
tion inspired and exalted its Teutonic con-
querors, and continues to bless them to this
day.
Such is the tendency of movement in that
which we in common parlance call the Old
World. As the nineteenth century closes, the
tide has already turned and the current is
flowing strongly. It is not too soon, for vast
is the work before it. Contrasted to the out-
side world in extent and population, the civili-
zation of the European group of families,
to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes
and fears, are so largely confined, has been
as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene
of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual
activities, it is not in them so much that it has
exceeded the rest of the world as in the politi-