to hover disembodied there, a lesson and a warning to future
generations. Whatever her final place in the records of mankind,
whether as the pioneer of modern civilization or the buccaneer
of the nations or, as would seem most likely, a goodly mixture
of both, she has at least--with the exception only of her great
mother, Rome--furnished the most instructive lessons in political
pathology yet recorded, and the advice to students of world progress
to familiarize themselves with her history is even more apt today than
when it first issued from the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay nearly a
century ago. Hardly had she reached the zenith of her power when the
disintegration began, and one by one her brilliant conquests dropped
away, to leave her alone in her faded splendor, with naught but her
vaunting pride left, another "Niobe of nations." In the countries
more in contact with the trend of civilization and more susceptible
to revolutionary influences from the mother country this separation
came from within, while in the remoter parts the archaic and outgrown
system dragged along until a stronger force from without destroyed it.

Nowhere was the crystallization of form and principle more pronounced
than in religious life, which fastened upon the mother country a
deadening weight that hampered all progress, and in the colonies,
notably in the Philippines, virtually converted her government into
a hagiarchy that had its face toward the past and either could not
or would not move with the current of the times. So, when "the shot
heard round the world," the declaration of humanity's right to be and
to become, in its all-encircling sweep, reached the lands controlled
by her it was coldly received and blindly rejected by the governing
powers, and there was left only the slower, subtler, but none the
less sure, process of working its way among the people to burst in
time in rebellion and the destruction of the conservative forces that