Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/320

 aim. Their immediate success was wonderful; their ultimate success has been in a manner complete. With the same systematic activity, continuous, homogeneous, and conscious of its aim, the earlier emperors pursued the Romanization of the world. Cities like Nicopolis and Marcianopolis were founded; Corinth and Patras and Jerusalem were raised from the dust; old provinces were colonized afresh, and newly discovered countries thrown open to settlement. Yet the panegyrist of the empire has to admit that the results attained were in part illusory. The flourishing industry and commerce, literature and art were no products of despotism, but of the earlier free institutions; and the new foundations were artificial and without true life. In modern France, not commerce only, but farreaching schemes of dominion, dictated to Colbert the annexation of Newfoundland, the purchase of the West Indies, the conquest of Senegal, and the systematic colonization of Canada and Cayenne; not gold, but visions of empire, dazzled the imagination of La Salle when he colonized Louisiana. A school of French publicists optimistically ascribes the present colonizing fever in their country to “an impulse of patriotic idealism.” England seems only lately to have become fully conscious of the vocation assigned to her by Hegel seventy years ago as “the missionary of civilization”; and Lord Rosebery's description of the British Empire as “the greatest secular agency for good existing among mankind” is no longer a hyperbole. Germany and Italy, with doubtful success or total failure, follow in her footsteps. Even the United States, once a self-contained commonwealth, now exercises an effective suzerainty over the South American republics, and, finding a continent too narrow for her ambition, annexes the Sandwich Islands. We are at the dawn of a new era of colonization.

5. Early in the century a group of French writers, of whom the most famous was Chateaubriand, reacting from the materialism of the French Revolution, proclaimed Christianity the source of European civilization. A generation later another idealist, Edgar Quinet, generalized the conception, and eloquently exhibited religion as the generating principle of every society: the source of its political institutions, art, literature, and philosophy, the secret of its life and the key to its history. In due time comes the scholar, and the late Fustel de Coulanges applied the view to the civilizations of India, Greece, and Rome. The other day Mr. B. Kidd placed the doctrine on a physiological foundation. But if this theory is true of society in general, it must be true of those special societies named colonies and (what is here in question) of their genesis. As has been seen, colonies have many origins. Yet religion is one of them: there are religious colonies. The religious sentiment has at all times played a