Nor does this result in the mood of Candide. The effort unconquered and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in very truth it is. Thus we are prepared to consider the following question. Given that death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall? Will the form it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of Akbar, have passed away? The question resolves itself into two parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist? And, secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds? §1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN First of all with regard to the former question. Recent studies in ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of recently civilized races. Yet this assumption still underlies much of the current speculation on the subject. Last century it was received as an axiomatic truth. Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. Not only Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously, as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world. Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _littérateurs_ indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document lasting as the _Germania_. Such comparisons are still at times made, but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide; both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only in appearance. It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius. It is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of political energy. The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of philosophy. Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor "Wertherism" for the battlefield.