ever that danger of a combination of all the powers, directed this time against the haughty and selfish privateer who, recking nought of others and recked of by none, was skirting the farthest capes for plunder, and stealing marches in every tropic, so as to rear a sky-scraping empire against the "ancient lights" of Europe itself.
Already, as so often happens, warnings rich with futurity were offered in the market-place and found no public. In Vienna, at the close of 1897, a voice was raised, not extremely important perhaps, yet significant certainly. Count Goluchowski, the Foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, whose policy was the united action of Austria and Russia in the Balkans, declared that the time was ripe when a combination of European powers was needed to preserve the Continent against "trans-oceanic influences." But it is England who in Southern Asia, in Australia, in Africa, and in America, has founded these parvenu powers that ruffle the complacency, and upset the balance, of the Old World.
More weighty was Mr. Chamberlain's speech of May 1898. Of that utterance it may be said without exaggeration, not indeed that it opened a new chapter in our international destiny, but that it indicated for the first time clearly that such a chapter must be opened soon.
The minister pointed out that, ever since the Crimean War, England had adopted a policy of isolation, so that she had had no allies, and, it was to
