304 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



aim. Tlieir immediate success was wonderful ; their ultimate suc- 

 cess has been in a manner complete. With the same systematic 

 activity, continuous, homogeneous, and conscious of its aim, the 

 earlier emperors pursued the Ttomanization of the world. Cities 

 like I^icopolis and Marcianopolis were founded; Corinth and Patras 

 and Jerusalem were raised from the dust; old provinces were colo- 

 nized afresh, and newly discovered countries thrown open to settle- 

 ment. Yet the panegyrist of the empire has to admit that the results 

 attained were in part illusory. The flourishing industry and com- 

 merce, literature and art were no products of despotism, but of the 

 earlier free institutions; and the new foundations were artificial and 

 without true life. In modern France, not commerce only, but far- 

 reaching schemes of dominion, dictated to Colbert the annexation of 

 Newfoundland, the purchase of the West Indies, the conquest of 

 Senegal, and the systematic colonizfition of Canada and Cayenne; 

 not gold, but visions of empire, dazzled the imagination of La Salle 

 when he colonized Louisiana. A school of French publicists opti- 

 mistically ascribes the present colonizing fever in their country to 

 " an impulse of patriotic idealism." England seems only lately to 

 have become fully conscious of the vocation assigned to her by 

 Hegel seventy years ago as " the missionary of civilization " ; and 

 Lord Rosebery's description of the British Empire as " the greatest 

 secular agency for good existing among mankind " is no longer a 

 hyperbole. Germany and Italy, with doubtful success or total fail- 

 ure, follow in her footsteps. Even the United States, once a self- 

 contained commonwealth, now exercises an effective suzerainty over 

 the South American republics, and, finding a continent too narrow 

 for her ambition, annexes the Sandwich Islands. We are at the 

 dawn of a new era of colonization. 



5. Early in the century a group of French writers, of whom the 

 most famous was Chateaubriand, reacting from the materialism of 

 the French Revolution, proclaimed Christianity the source of Euro- 

 pean civilization. A generation later another idealist, Edgar Quinet, 

 generalized the conception, and eloquently exhibited religion as the 

 generating principle of every society: the source of its political 

 institutions, art, literature, and philosophy, the secret of its life and 

 the key to its history. In due time comes the scholar, and the late 

 Fustel de Coulanges applied the view to the civilizations of India, 

 Greece, and Rome. The other day Mr. B. Kidd placed the doctrine 

 on a physiological foundation. But if this tlieory is true of society 

 in general, it must be true of those special societies named colonies 

 and (what is here in question) of their genesis. As has been seen, 

 colonies have many origins. Yet religion is one of them: there are 

 religious colonies. The religious sentiment has at all times played a 



