Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/130

118 some heart of grace, if he remembered that, for the last fifteen centuries since the entry of our barbarous ancestors into the Roman Empire, not a decade has passed in which Europe has not been either at war or in active preparation for it. For the continental nations have never lived otherwise than in crises, excursions, and alarms.

The causes of this preternatural vehemence, implanted in the peoples of the western stock, lie inscrutably far beyond knowledge. No analysis can account for that bacillus of mutual hatred with which our tribal parents, issuing from the German forests and the Asiatic steppes, inoculated the West. In the South-Eastern Europe of our own time, that brasier of so many races, these primitive passions may be witnessed still, burning with the crude and unalloyed fire of antiquity. See the Bulgarian, all muscle, next to the Greek, all nerve; the Servian, haunted by memories of an heroic past and of a lost imperialism, cheek by jowl with the robber race of Albania. For these peoples to quarrel, any pretext has been enough. Meanwhile, the advanced peoples of Europe, while contemning these archaisms and taking longer views of mutual destruction, have hastened to fill the intervals of their wars with the increase of their armaments.

So much for the past. But it is the future that concerns us. Democracy has been busy conquering Europe since the French Revolution, and now that it has definitely become dominant, will it tend