SIXTH REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I909 209 



was destined to be readily transferred to the English for the sake 

 of greater opportunities to the Dutch East India Company. 



Germany was not yet a maritime power. Loosely compacted 

 under the failing hegemony of the House of Austria she was upon 

 the threshold of the Thirty Years' War, in which the most fright- 

 ful slaughter and devastation were to destroy her cities, lay waste 

 her fields, reduce her population from thirty millioms to twelve mil- 

 lions, and set back her civilization for centuries. 



Into that vortex of destruction Sweden also was about to be 

 drawn, and her forces were to be engrossed in the struggle for 

 national existence, so that the hopes of Gustavus Adolphus for a 

 New Sweden upon the banks of the Delaware were to fail of 

 fruition, and the Swedish colony in America was to pass with 

 hardly a struggle into the hands first of the Dutch and then of 

 the English. 



Prussia was a dependent dukedom. Russia had still three quarters 

 of a century to wait before Peter the Great was to begin to lead 

 her from semibarbarism into the ranks of civiHzed powers. Italy 

 was a geographical expression covering a multitude of petty states. 



Of all the peoples of Europe, only the French and the English 

 possessed the power, the energy, the adventurous courage, the op- 

 portunity and the occasion for expansion across the Atlantic. The 

 field and the prize were for them and for them alone. 



Upon the throne of France was Henry the Fourth, the greatest 

 of French kings. In the governing class of Frenchmen, political 

 and religious, were the virile strength, the intellectual acumen, the 

 romantic chivalry, the strong passions, the love of glory, the capac- 

 ity for devotion to ideals, which were to make possible the rule of 

 Richelieu, the ascendancy of Louis the Fourteenth, the political 

 idealists of the Eighteenth century, the tremendous social forces 

 whose outbreak in the French Revolution appalled the world, and 

 the armies of Napoleon. 



In England the reign of great Elizabeth had just closed. It was 

 the England of Spenser and Shakspere and Bacon; of Cecil and 

 Raleigh; of Drake and Frobisher. John Hampden and Crom- 

 well and Milton were in their childhood. For four centuries since 

 Magna Charta, Englishmen had become accustomed to the asser- 

 tion of the individual rights of the citizen against arbitrary power. 

 Since the repudiation of Roman supremacy over the national church 

 by Henry the Eighth three generations had become wonted to the 

 assertion of religious freedom. King James's translation of the 



