rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and spiritual
achievement, or should fall forever into the barren and monotonous way
of living and thinking which has always distinguished the half-civilized
populations of Asia. This--and nothing less than this, I think--was the
practical political question really at stake in the sixteenth century
between Protestantism and Catholicism. Holland and England entered the
lists in behalf of the one solution of this question, while Spain and
the Pope defended the other, and the issue was fought out on European
soil, as we have seen, with varying success. But the discovery of
America now came to open up an enormous region in which whatever seed of
civilization should be planted was sure to grow to such enormous
dimensions as by and by to exert a controlling influence upon all such
controversies. It was for Spain, France, and England to contend for the
possession of this vast region, and to prove by the result of the
struggle which kind of civilization was endowed with the higher and
sturdier political life. The race which here should gain the victory was
clearly destined hereafter to take the lead in the world, though the
rival powers could not in those days fully appreciate this fact. They
who founded colonies in America as trading-stations or military outposts
probably did not foresee that these colonies must by and by become
imperial states far greater in physical mass than the states which
planted them. It is not likely that they were philosophers enough to
foresee that this prodigious physical development would mean that the
political ideas of the parent state should acquire a hundred-fold power
and seminal influence in the future work of the world. It was not until
the American Resolution that this began to be dimly realized by a few
prescient thinkers. It is by no means so fully realized even now that a
clear and thorough-going statement of it has not somewhat an air of
novelty. When the highly-civilized community, representing the ripest
political ideas of England, was planted in America, removed from the