For century after century, our civilisation lay low in its Mediterranean lair. It knew but a small part of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and no pricks of curiosity impelled it to ascertain how far the world extended over land and sea beyond the vague bounds which marked the limit of its efforts. That small part of the world satisfied the ambitions of our ancestors, though they certainly were not shy and craven. Confined in that narrow corner of the earth and with only the scanty resources which it could provide, they created literatures, arts, philosophies, states, laws, and religions. Some of these creations are alive to this day, and help us distant descendants to shed a little beauty and to impose a little order on the modern world. Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries there began a great change in the history of our civilisation. Impelled by the wish to reach India by way of the Atlantic, our forefathers began to explore the earth. Gradually geographical exploration became the preoccupation of governments, the passion of the public, and the business of a great number of persons who made almost a vocation of these daring voyages. And behold one fine day, one grand day, the most fortunate and daring of the navigators who were exploring the Atlantic in every direction discovered America. In mid-Atlantic there lay two connected continents, stretching from one hemisphere to the other, covering many latitudes and a great variety of clime, and much of this vast territory was still but sparsely inhabited. It was then that our forefathers realised how vast and rich was the earth, and how small and poor in comparison seemed that Mediterranean world in which for so many centuries they had lived. It was then that they began to pass beyond the limits within which they had been so long confined, to invade and to conquer the outside world. The Pillars of Hercules, which had been the impassable geographical limit of the ancient Mediterranean world, were not, however, the only bounds which they passed; they transcended also the moral and intellectual limits which until then had circumscribed their thoughts and actions. All the time that the ancient Mediterranean civilisation, turned loose into the Atlantic, was striking root and expanding in America, an uninterrupted sequence of events and movements was taking place in Europe, destroying ancient laws, ancient traditions, and ancient discipline; upsetting, in other words, the bounds placed in the past to the thought, the sentiment, and the will of Man. The most important of these events were: the Protestant Reformation, the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advances of science, the French Revolution and its wars, the birth and the development of the great industrial movement, and the all but universal triumph of democratic ideas.