and screechy recriminations, from the time of the Grevy-Wilson affair to the loathsome end of the Panama Company.  In the United Kingdom the wheels of progress lurched along heavily after the year 1886, when Gladstone made his sudden strategic turn towards the following of Parnell.  Thus it came about that the parties of progress found themselves almost helpless or even discredited; and the young giant of Democracy suddenly stooped and shrivelled as if with premature decay.

The causes of this seeming paralysis were not merely political and dynamic:  they were also ethical.  The fervour of religious faith was waning under the breath of a remorseless criticism and dogmatic materialism.  Already, under their influence, the teachers of the earlier age, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning, had lost their joyousness and spontaneity; and the characteristic thinkers of the new age were chiefly remarkable for the arid formalism with which they preached the gospel of salvation for the strong and damnation to the weak.  The results of the new creed were not long in showing themselves in the political sphere.  If the survival of the fittest were the last word of philosophy, where was the need to struggle on behalf of the weak and oppressed?  In that case, it might be better to leave them to the following clutch of the new scientific devil; while those who had charged through to the head of the rout enjoyed themselves with utmost abandon.  Such was, and is, the deduction from the new gospel (crude enough, doubtless, in many respects), which has finally petrified in the lordly egotism of Nietzche and in the unlovely outlines of one or two up-to-date Utopias.

These fashions will have their day.  Meanwhile it is the duty of the historian to note that self-sacrifice and heroism have a hard struggle for life in an age which for a time exalted Herbert Spencer to the highest pinnacle of greatness, which still riots in the calculating selfishness of Nietzsche and raves about Omar Khayyam.

Seeing, then, that the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe were almost barren of great formative movements such as had ennobled the previous decades, we may well leave that over-governed, over-drilled continent weltering in its riches and discontent, its militarism and moral weakness, in order to survey events further afield which carried on the State-building process to lands as yet chaotic or ill-organised.  There, at least, we may chronicle some advance, hampered though it has been by the moral languor or laxity that has warped the action of Europeans in their new spheres.