There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers, and those numbers, however incoherent now in mass, composed of units which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest survives.  Deficient, apparently, in aptitude for political and social organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable.  This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which, as compared to ourselves, they now labor.  But men do not covet less the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create,—­a trait wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force.  Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Caesar’s, may have erected against them.  Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned—­forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits.

Nevertheless, even under such conditions,—­which obtained increasingly during the decline of the Roman Empire,—­positions suitably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retard and, by gaining time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the general issue to the benefit of the world.  Hence the immense importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is, and where occupation should betimes begin.  Here, in part at least, is the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations to-day.  Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to this day.

Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance call the Old World.  As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has already turned and the current is flowing strongly.  It is not too soon, for vast is the work before it.  Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert.  The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not