before the mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European.  During that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar.  Then the European advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia.  Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest is always likely in the long run to vanish.  But very much of it represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood.  During this period substantially all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent.  The first exception of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation—­a phenomenon unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours, and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the West.

During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead.  The movement began with Spain and Portugal.  Their flowering time was as brief as it was wonderful.  The gorgeous pages of their annals are illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets, and painters.  Then their days of greatness ceased.  Many partial explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we cannot lay our hands.  Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.

About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and dominion.  Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the world’s waste spaces.