About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of
the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of
Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the
Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp
leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has
at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion;
but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has
been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over
the world's waste spaces.
Comparison is often made between the Empire of Britain and the Empire
of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern
civilization, the Empire of Rome is of course the more important,
simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other
continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the
Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The Empire of Rome is the
most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be
compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the
nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the
stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the
other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely
increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older
empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years,
there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.
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