countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this
planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning
eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light? The
history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us.
Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved
west across our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have
all, in their day of power, risen in the East and set in the West.


This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of
ages. It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents of
adventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East to
West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have been
carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and Carthage
to the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the English from
Jutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of their conquest;
it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation of
the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the new
West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East
to the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws
have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has
had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of
affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb
and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms
set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at
a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of
the East to the verge of the Old World, filling the harbours of the
Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of Italy and Spain with
wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual decadence that followed this
flood, there gathered in the returning tide a greater energy and volume