6. Is England Played Out?

Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our
commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period
of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a
nation go on being great for ever? If so, are _we_ that nation? If not,
have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone
conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas
on the terrace, to resolve them?

Most people have talked of late as though the palmy days of England were
fairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as I
can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when
Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of
Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work
consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett
strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the
British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or
thereabouts--and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the
contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of
residence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion.
Hence, for the last two or three centuries, I have learned to discount
these recurrent Jeremiads of Toryism, and to judge the question of our
decadence or progress by a more rational standard.

There is only one such rational standard; and that is, to discover the
causes and conditions of our commercial prosperity, and then to inquire
whether those causes and conditions are being largely altered or
modified by the evolution of new phases. If they are, England must begin
to decline; if they are not, her day is not yet come. Home Rule she will
survive; even the Eight Hours bogey, we may presume, will not finally
dispose of her.

Now, the centre of civilisation is not a fixed point. It has varied from
time to time, and may yet vary. In the very earliest historical period,
there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. There
were civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discrete
civilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came into
contact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than our
own came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, of
Peru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutual
communication of empire with empire. It was in the Ægean and the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point where
great commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. The
Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era.
Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the