individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their military organization, rendered their armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day.  They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the Imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India.  The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them.  The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them.  They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them.  Yet they had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them.  So the extraordinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development.  Yet the Greek civilization itself fell, because this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern both themselves and others.  When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.

What is the lesson to us to-day?  Are we to go the way of the older civilizations?  The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world’s surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—­are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes?  We cannot be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end.  There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.

Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall.  I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse.  I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held.  But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true.  We cannot afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied.  Neither the military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.