Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: still survives in political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates. The Gradual shift processes which have gradually shifted ing of primacy , , . ., , . from the men the seat of empire until the prominent who spoke . , , . Latin, and part played nineteen centuries ajjo by their descend , , , . ., . , ants, to the Kome and Alexandria, on opposite sides English, of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much more than merely catalogue the facts of political history ; one must acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain anything like complete results. In order to make a statement simple enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many circumstances and many considerations that might in one way and another qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which has now for a long time been making the world more English and less Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty change, we mustlook a little into that process of nation making which has been going on since pr...
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