nations of the European family, to continue indefinitely the present realization of peace and plenty,—­in themselves good things, but which are advocated largely on the ground that man lives by bread alone,—­in view of the changed conditions of the world which the departing nineteenth century leaves with us as its bequest?  Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the clamor for which rises ominously—­the word is used advisedly—­among our latter-day cries?  None shares more heartily than the writer the aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to relax into an artificial peace, resting not upon the working of national consciences, as questions arise, but upon a Permanent Tribunal,—­an external, if self-imposed authority,—­the realization in modern policy of the ideal of the mediaeval Papacy?

The outlook—­the signs of the times, what are they?  It is not given to human vision, peering into the future, to see more than as through a glass, darkly; men as trees walking, one cannot say certainly whither.  Yet signs may be noted even if they cannot be fully or precisely interpreted; and among them I should certainly say is to be observed the general outward impulse of all the civilized nations of the first order of greatness—­except our own.  Bound and swathed in the traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under the specious plea of peace and plenty—­fulness of bread—­hug an ideal of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with which the world of European civilization must not only look forward to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems to await it.  I say we do so; I should more surely express my thought by saying that the outward impulse already is in the majority of the nation, as shown when particular occasions arouse their attention, but that it is as yet retarded, and may be retarded perilously long, by those whose views of national policy are governed by maxims framed in the infancy of the Republic.

This outward impulse of the European nations, resumed on a large scale after nearly a century of intermission, is not a mere sudden appearance, sporadic, and unrelated to the past.  The signs of its coming, though unnoted, were visible soon after the century reached its half-way stage, as was also its great correlative, equally unappreciated then, though obvious enough now, the stirring of the nations of Oriental civilization.  It is a curious reminiscence of my own that when in Yokohama, Japan, in 1868, I was asked to translate a Spanish letter from Honolulu, relative to a ship-load of Japanese coolies to be imported into Hawaii.  I knew the person engaged to go as physician to the