Europe, at the same time that she thus impresses her ideas upon old nations like China, Japan, and India, leaving them slowly to leaven the solid mass, does more rapid work by transplanting scions from her own stock to new soil. She has within a few generations built up great states in the most distant quarters of the globe, using her own manners and political institutions born of her own. The populations of these new nations probably equal, combined, her own of the seventeenth century. To these inchoate empires the destinies of humanity in the future will be in large measure committed. They bring to bear upon boundless material resources the energies of youth, little trammelled by prescription and tra dition. There are indications that among them too, as among their parent communities, contests for supremacy are to occur. But these belong to the future. We have grounds for the hope that humanizing influences already gaining force will moderate their acerbity, if unable wholly to exclude from their decision the 71/lima ratio of war. Let us not be utopian. Man is an animal, and a fighting animal. He still selects his idols from the battlefield. Vet if in his civilized character he has been able to teach subject savages that war "does not pay," perhaps he may one day learn his own teaching.
In rapidity and magnitude of extension distant commerce has not been exceeded by the more local trade between adjacent or closely-neighboring countries. And this has been quite as promotive of peace and progress. Throughout the United States—that is, the greater part of the North American continent—absolute free trade prevails, with beneficial results patent and familiar to all. The movement of persons and property between the various European states remains obstructed by custom-houses and by some remnant of passports. If we call the tariff, however, simply a domestic tax and the customs officials tax-collectors, we get another view of the system. Its operation is gradually becoming smoother and its methods less vexatious. Certainly, it has not availed to prevent an enormous growth of traffic between the several countries of Europe and their respective provinces. The inland commerce between Germany and Italy has quadrupled within half a dozen years, Italy buying German iron with silk and wine. Communication between England and the Continent is more frequent than between England and Ireland. The Turkish ques tion is a question of Austrian trade, and would soon be settled but for that element of complication. By the adoption of the metrical system a common standard of weights and measures has been established among the leading continental countries, and several of them use, in the French franc and Italian lira, a common currency unit. The Germans are giving up their old printed character, so mischievous to the eyesight, and a few of the Russian letters will soon be the only exceptions to the universal use of the Roman type. These changes are due to the demands of commerce.
Diversity of language will yield more slowly, if at all; though that, too, has been attacked. French, long triumphant in diplomacy, is gaining ubiquity in the salon, thanks to the increase of travel, "all roads leading to Paris." When excursion-trains get into the habit of disregarding frontiers, and the peasantry and burghers are set in motion, the reign of dialect may be threatened, discouraging, to those who hope for uniformity of speech, as is the contemplation of polyglot Belgium, the meeting ground of all the armies, all the tourists, and all the tongues. Doubt less, there are mutual adaptations between the genius and the language of a people which are not without value to others. Each may think best in its own words, and perceive shades and tints of truth which another medium would blur. United Italy, United Germany, Holy Russia, and the "haughty islanders" of Britain must certainly be of that persuasion.
Costume, the physical as language is the mental dress of a nation, is fast yielding to the unifying influences of the day. It is fully illustrated, in its ancient and modern styles, in the Plates attached to this work. Its provincial peculiarities, after a survival in some cases of centuries, are one after another disappearing. The Turk has doffed the turban in favor of the fez. The kilt is fading into the cutaway, and will soon be as much of a rarity in Athens as in Edinburgh. The Spaniard retains only the sash, his mutton-pie hat being quite a new fashion. " Europe ends at the Pyrenees," and beyond them, if anywhere, one would look for the survival of ancient dress. The French, German, and Dutch peasant-women retain certain eccentricities of linen in the way of head-gear, but there is no telling when that white flag may be struck. Climate will of course be somewhat exact ing in this matter. The Laplander—or his supplanter, for he is said to be dwindling in numbers—will make the reindeer his draper, and the moujik will be long in finding a winter substitute for sheep-skin. The American Chinaman, with a facility of adaptation that speaks well for his nation's capacity for progress, has dropped all of his native array save the pigtail, and that he keeps closely under cover. An unfortunate thing is, that the fashions of the day are set by the denizens of a latitude wherein cold rather than heat is to be guarded against. The prevalent costume is therefore not only too heavy for warmer climates, but too heavy for a temperate region. We are overclad. Other portions of the body as well as the face should be inured to the air. The Highlander never complain ed of his cold knees: he did not shiver till he was ordered into trews.