The peoples of Europe have difficulties and dangers which are due to their own peculiar situation. The people of North America have to meet certain risks of a somewhat different character, owing to our peculiar position. In Europe we see an accumulation of many races who reached their _Ultima Thule_ at the coast of the Atlantic, and who have had to accommodate themselves to each other as best they could. Speaking different languages and having different political organisations, they have consolidated into separate nations. This result has only been reached after many conflicts, and the result has been the combination and absorption of smaller states into greater, such as we find them to-day. This result has not terminated conflicts; it has reduced their frequency but has increased their scope and importance. To-day the antagonisms of these nations impose great burdens upon them, but they are at the same time productive of great good. With men as with other animals excellence is the result of use and exercise. With animals this exercise has been compulsory, and has been due largely to the pressure of hunger. Among men intellectual and ethical excellence may be due to compulsion, or it may result from the capacity to develop lofty ideals. In the former case man is driven; in the latter case he is led. Now the organisation of human society is such, that if man will not be led, he is driven. The “mills of the Gods” are ever ready for those who lag behind in the progress of the race. But there are mills and mills, and no mill has yet appeared in human history better calculated to grind out a good grist from an intellectual point of view, than western Eurasia, or Europe. The emulations and antagonisms of so many nations have stimulated men to do their best, and have stimulated governments to aid them in doing it, for several centuries. The result has been modern art, modern science pure and applied, and modern philosophy. To produce all this however, Europe has been under pressure, and the pressure has been in some, if not all of its countries, more or less galling.