Principles of western civilisation

156 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

which the ideal of universal conquest had once and for ever culminated.

The ruling fact which stands out clearly before the imagination in regarding this movement of peoples as a whole, is that it must have represented a process of military selection, probably the most sustained, prolonged, and culminating in character that the race has ever undergone. Every item of information, which recent science and research have been able to contribute to our knowledge of it, adds to the reasons for estimating it in this light. In the history of all the movements of the conquering peoples, we appear to be always in the presence of races of pure white stock ; inhabitants, therefore, at the outset, of territories where the struggle with nature for existence had been for long ages continuous and severe. In all their wanderings, conflicts, and conquests, it must have been the bravest, the strongest, the most daring, who continuously went forward. The fittest who survived were those who did so in their own stern right. The process as a whole must have been one of unexampled stress in all its stages; a process of military selection, rigorous, effective, and immensely prolonged in time.

This is the stupendous framework in which we see set that period of the world’s development in which the type of society organised to obtain the highest potentiality in the present time is now about to become the rival of all other types; and in which the process of social order organised towards military efficiency is about to attain, before the opening of the second epoch of social evolution, the position of the one surviving type which has become supreme over all others.