in Europe; but that civilization would have been Asiatic in its character, and it might have been as fleeting as the labors of the Carthaginians in Europe and Africa.  Nor would they have felt any interest in the preservation of the works of those Greeks who wrote before the Marathonian time, which they would have regarded with that contempt with which most conquerors look upon the labors of those whom they have enslaved.  That most brilliant of ages, the age of Pericles, could never have come to pass under the dominion of Persia; and the Greeks of Europe, when ruled by satraps from Susa, would have been of as little weight in the ancient world as, under that kind of rule, were the Greeks of Ionia.  All future history was involved in the decision of the Persian contest, and we may well feel grateful that the event was not left for the hands of men to decide, but that the winds and the waves of the Grecian seas so far equalized the power of the combatants as to enable the Greeks, who fought for us as well as for themselves, to roll back the tide of Oriental conquest.  We might not have had even the Secession War, if there had been no storms in the Thracian seas in a summer the roses of which perished more than two thousand three hundred years ago.[A]

[Footnote A:  When the Athenian patriots under Thrasybulus occupied Phyle, they would have been destroyed by the forces of the Thirty Tyrants, had not a violent snow-storm happened, which compelled the besiegers to retreat.  The patriots characterized this storm as Providential.  Had the weather remained fair, the patriots would have been beaten, the democracy would not have been restored, and we should never have had the orations of Demosthenes; and perhaps even Plato might not have written and thought for all after time.]

The modern contest which most resembles that which was waged between the Greeks and the Persians is that war between England and Spain which came to a crisis in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was destroyed by the tempests of the Northern seas, after having been well mauled by the English fleet.  The English seamen behaved well, as they always do; but the Spanish loss would not have been irreparable, if the weather had remained mild.  What men had begun so well storms completed.  A contrary wind prevented the Spanish Admiral from pursuing his course in a direction that would have proved favorable to his second object, which was the preservation of his fleet.  He was forced to stand to the North, so that he rushed right into the jaws of destruction.  He encountered in those remote and almost unknown waters tempests that were even more merciless than the fighting ships and fireships of the island heretics.  Philip II. bore his loss with the same calmness that he bore the victory of Lepanto.  As, on hearing of the latter, he merely said, “Don John risked a great deal,” so, when tidings came to him that the Invincible Armada had been found vincible, he quietly remarked, “I