Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 197

an unusual degree the elements of scientific interest have been accumulated in the period. He is standing, as it were, in history, watching the last waves of the military migrations, that so long flowed westward over Europe, coming slowly to rest. They are the waves of that process which have flowed strongest and- farthest; and which represent the peoples amongst whom the process of military selection has been most searching and most prolonged. He has in sight, as it were, the races in whom the tide of military conquest has reached its flood, and to whom the future of the world is now about to pass; the races who, for a period immense and indefinitely prolonged in the future, are about to provide and keep clear in the world the stage upon which a new epoch of evolution is destined to open. And it is into the great matrix provided in history by the still standing political fabric of that empire, in which the ideal of military conquest has once and for ever culminated, that he sees these races, the latest and still virgin product of a world-process of military selection, coming to rest at last to receive the impress upon them of the forces about to be unloosed in the world.

In the world of history into which these races were thus ushered, on their contact alike with the political forms of the Roman empire and with the products of Greek culture, a single governing principle had hitherto held all others in subjection. It was the world of the ascendant present. It was the world in which the ultimate meaning that every human institution yielded on analysis was, that, as there was nothing more important than the present, so there was nothing higher than the forces which