of the same landlocked sea.  Again a step, but not an expansion, and it looked helplessly west upon the Atlantic:  its ancient domain of the East almost forgotten.  Then that long gaze was gratified, and Cathay was seen.  With that came actual expansion, which continued in both directions of the globe’s circuit until now.  At length the world of thought, of inquiry and of common interest is becoming coincident with the sphere.

In the direction of international politics progress during the century has not kept pace with the advance in other walks.  We are accustomed to speak of Europe as forming a republic of nations, but that cannot be said with much more truth than it could have been in the middle of the sixteenth century.  A sense of the value to the peace of the continent of a balance of power was then recognized; and the object was attained in some measure as soon as the career of Charles V., which had inculcated the lesson, admitted at his abdication of an application of it.  Treaties were then framed, as they have been constantly since, for this purpose, and the observation of them was perhaps as faithful.  The passions of nations, like those of men, furnish reason with its slowest and latest conquests.  The great wars of the French Revolution, and the short and sharp ones which have, after an indispensable breathing-spell, recently followed it, were as causeless and as defiant of the compacts designed to prevent them as those of the Reformation period or of the Thirty Years.  They were so many confessions that an efficient international code is one of the inventions for which we must look to the future.  It is something, meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom, the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an end.  The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, France and Italy have been within a few generations absorbed into three masses—­so many police districts which have proved tolerably effective in keeping the peace within the large territories they cover.  The nations, thus massing themselves for exterior defence, and maintaining a healthy system of graduated and distributed powers, original or conferred, for the support of domestic order and activity, have cultivated successfully the field of home politics.

In that the change for the better is certainly vast.  It is difficult for Americans, whose acquaintance with European history is usually derived from compends, to realize what an incubus of complicated and conflicting privileges, restrictions and forms has, within the century, been lifted from the energies of the Old World.  The sweeping reforms in French law are but a small part of what has been done.  All the neighbors of France, from Derry to the Dardanelles, have shared in the blessing.  We may be assisted to an idea of it by turning to the experience of our own country,