Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/20

4 1897, which ended in the complete defeat of Russia and France, the overwhelming influence of the Teutonic peoples, that is to say, the Britannic Confederation and the German Empire, has succeeded in establishing a Roman peace unbroken during this Twentieth century.

The great British dependency of India was still held under the paternal despotism of England, which, after making various experiments, had found that the race-antipathies and religious animosities of the natives, together with a rooted incapacity for self-government, rendered it expedient to revert to the old methods of rule so successfully practised by her earlier satraps.

Such was the political condition of the world at the beginning of the unhappy year whose events I am about to describe. Socially the state of things was less satisfactory. The decay of religion and the cultivation of a gospel of selfishness had produced its natural results. Pauperism and misery, formerly relieved by the contributions of the benevolent, was now exclusively administered by a department of the state, and the final triumph of the social economists was won when by an act of Congress it was made a misdemean-