304 THE OCEAN RIVER 



England remained as the dominant Atlantic power because 

 she was only partly entangled in the self-destructive rivalries 

 of European wars, and because as a nation her power grew 

 with the flood of new energies released with the sixteenth 

 century. England's people followed England's conquests; and 

 England took to the sea and dominated the world of the 

 Ocean River and ultimately built her great nineteenth-century 

 empire on that sea power, which in turn gave her control of 

 the commerce of the world by her strategic grip on the thor- 

 oughfares of trade. Her loss of the American colonies proved 

 a political loss rather than a long-term commercial handicap; 

 it did not affect her wealth. 



Today it is plain that the original thrust and power of these 

 European nations of the eastern borders of the Ocean River 

 has run full course and receded eastward, again leaving in the 

 west a transplanted world of European blood, European ideas, 

 and traces of European culture, all made over by a strange 

 and powerful environment into a related but separate civili- 

 zation. For a while this new world of America, successfully in 

 revolt from all European ties, thought of itself as independent 

 of the old countries; all sights were set to the west. But there 

 was an end to west. The frontier of free land, endless natural 

 resource, and room for an expanding population is just about 

 over. We in the west have come in our day to the end of a 

 four-hundred-year period of expansion; we face either a pro- 

 gressive phase of a growing western civilization, or the final 

 phase. 



What does our study of the nature and resources of the 

 Ocean River bring to light? The westward migration from 

 Europe has come to an end. There is no longer a free move- 

 ment of surplus populations, because there is no more free 

 land north of the Caribbean; and the resources of the western 

 world have been so exploited that the promise of quick wealth 

 for energetic and ambitious people has been radically restricted. 



