Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 57.djvu/404

394 enthusiastic—are a real acquisition to communities immersed in material pursuits and cut off from the movement of science in Europe, and their position is deservedly high and well remunerated. Doctors, lawyers, artists, teachers, experts in many departments, place the colonies in the same position relatively to less-favored communities, as the sons of a squire relatively to the sons of an artisan. In this respect, as in most others, a colony follows the example of the mother country. The introduction of literature, the sciences and the arts into the mother-land was to a large extent at all stages in its history the work of aliens. It is so still; the names of Bunsen, Rosen, Max Müller, Goldstücker, Aufrecht, and a score of others, are proofs that men as well as things that are 'made in Germany' are still imported into England. To descend to the mechanical arts, "the ranks of skilled workmen in America were and are renewed from the more fertile soil of Europe"; even the workmen in the Portland stone-quarries are imported from England. The second mode in which foreign culture was introduced into the mother-land in common with all others—visits made abroad for discipleship or instruction—has all along been, and is now increasingly, maintained. Colonial students go to Europe to be trained in medicine and law. Experts go to become acquainted with advances in science and medicine, or with recent improvements in mechanical processes. The wealthier colonists who spend occasional seasons in Europe bring back new (or antiquated) social or political notions, and Americans who thus try to import into the United States an aristocratic style of living have to be ridiculed out of it. The third method by which an infusion of foreign civilization may pass into another community is by books, works of plastic art, music, tools, implements and instruments, and into this vast inheritance of the mother country the daughter colonies have entered. They participate in the advances made by other countries as well. The Canadian colonies owe only less to the United States than to England, and American railway cars, agricultural implements and household utensils are in use in Australasia. In New Zealand a French Masonic lodge has struck root.

The new colonial centers thus formed react on the father-land, as we may conceive the daughter buds to react on the parent hydroid. The discovery of the New World and the successive entrance of the five great maritime powers upon a long and fierce rivalry for its possession transformed the politics of Europe. Great wars were undertaken solely with this object. The political center of gravity was shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. New industrial interests were created. Insular and stagnant powers, isolated Continental powers, received a fresh lease of life, and, along with warlike Continental powers, were expanded to the measure of the globe. New sympathies were generated. Wider horizons were opened out. The heart and brain of all were