of this civilization.  Having at length won the privilege of living without risk of slaughter and pillage at the hands of Saracens or Mongols, the question now arose whether the people of Europe should go on and apply their intelligence freely to the problem of making life as rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and spiritual achievement, or should fall forever into the barren and monotonous way of living and thinking which has always distinguished the half-civilized populations of Asia.  This—­and nothing less than this, I think—­was the practical political question really at stake in the sixteenth century between Protestantism and Catholicism.  Holland and England entered the lists in behalf of the one solution of this question, while Spain and the Pope defended the other, and the issue was fought out on European soil, as we have seen, with varying success.  But the discovery of America now came to open up an enormous region in which whatever seed of civilization should be planted was sure to grow to such enormous dimensions as by and by to exert a controlling influence upon all such controversies.  It was for Spain, France, and England to contend for the possession of this vast region, and to prove by the result of the struggle which kind of civilization was endowed with the higher and sturdier political life.  The race which here should gain the victory was clearly destined hereafter to take the lead in the world, though the rival powers could not in those days fully appreciate this fact.  They who founded colonies in America as trading-stations or military outposts probably did not foresee that these colonies must by and by become imperial states far greater in physical mass than the states which planted them.  It is not likely that they were philosophers enough to foresee that this prodigious physical development would mean that the political ideas of the parent state should acquire a hundred-fold power and seminal influence in the future work of the world.  It was not until the American Resolution that this began to be dimly realized by a few prescient thinkers.  It is by no means so fully realized even now that a clear and thorough-going statement of it has not somewhat an air of novelty.  When the highly-civilized community, representing the ripest political ideas of England, was planted in America, removed from the manifold and complicated checks we have just been studying in the history of the Old World, the growth was portentously rapid and steady.  There were no Attilas now to stand in the way,—­only a Philip or a Pontiac.  The assaults of barbarism constituted only a petty annoyance as compared with the conflict of ages which had gone on in Europe.  There was no occasion for society to assume a military aspect.  Principles of self-government were at once put into operation, and no one thought of calling them in question.  When the neighbouring civilization of inferior type—­I allude to the French in Canada—­began to become seriously troublesome, it was struck down at