RETROSPECT AND FORECAST 205 



domination lasted, industry and commerce maintained 

 large populations, reared opulent cities, and extracted 

 from the soil the richest harvest that the existing 

 agriculture could produce. But these isolated civilisa- 

 tions rarely had a long existence. As fire unsupplied 

 with fresh fuel dies out, so they began to degenerate 

 and fall into decrepitude when the energy evoked by 

 aggressive ambition and external aggrandisement was 

 no longer called forth, when it did not happen that 

 they were summarily blotted out or cast down from 

 their pre-eminence by the ruthless hand of a foreign 

 conqueror. 



The civilisation that awoke to development and 

 progress in the nineteenth century embraced, as I 

 have said, all the strong and virile nations of mankind, 

 the foundations of whose polity and social life have 

 been laid in their common Christian faith, and that 

 share in degrees differing according to their several 

 stages of advancement in the various elements of 

 progress that have come into force and operation 

 with the discoveries and inventions that form the 

 characteristic features of the past century. 



No civilised community now exists in a state of 

 isolation. All existing civilised communities are 

 bound together by many ties, and are working to- 

 gether towards one end, the ingathering into an 

 industrial and moral solidarity of all the races of 

 mankind, and the conquest of all the material re- 

 sources of the spacious earth. The bonds of material 

 interest that are being formed among them by com- 



