Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from Rome, so in
this deeper study we shall discover a grand and far-reaching Teutonic
Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting the Roman Idea. Our
attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the
seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see
in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue;
and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall
begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that
witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had before our
minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all
this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as
nearly as may be, to the beginning of things. [Sidenote: Gradual
shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants,
to the men who speak English]

If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]

In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,