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. In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus, she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House of Barca, which rendered the struggle for ever memorable. It was the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened her but to die.