The Arena | Page 2

their scope.
The condition of mankind, during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, bore some curious analogies to its state at present. A certain stage or epoch of human life seemed to have run its course and come to a stop. The impulses which had started it were exhausted. In the political field, feudalism, originally beneficent, had become tyrannous and stifling; and monarchy, at first an austere necessity, had grown to be, beyond measure, arrogant, selfish, and luxurious. In science, the old methods had proved themselves puerile and inefficient, and the leading scientists were magicians and witches; in literature, no poet had arisen worthy to strike the lyre that Chaucer tuned to music. As for religion, the corruptions of the papacy, and the corresponding degradation of the monasteries and of the priesthood generally, had brought it down from a region of sublime and self-abnegating faith, to a commodity for raising money, and a cloak to hide profligacy. Martin Luther was still in the womb of the future; and so were Shakespeare, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Oliver Cromwell. Pessimists were declaring, according to their invariable custom, that what was bad would get worse, and that what was good would disappear. But there were, scattered here and there throughout Christendom, a number of men of the profounder, optimistic tendency, who saw in existing abuses but the misuse or misapprehension of elements intrinsically good; who knew that evils bear in themselves the seeds of their own extirpation; and who believed that Providence, far from having failed in its design to secure the ultimate happiness of the human race, was bringing the old order of things to a close in order to provide place for something new and higher.
But that obstacle in the way of improvement which was apparently the most immovable, was the geographical one. The habitable earth was used up. Outside of Europe there was nothing, save inaccessible wilderness, and barren, boundless seas. There was nothing for the mass of men to do, and yet their energy and desire were as great as ever; there was nowhere for them to go, and yet they were steadily increasing in numbers. The Crusades had amused them for a while, but they were done with; the plague had thinned them out, and war had helped the plague; but the birth-rate was more than a match for both. A new planet, with all the fresh interests and possibilities which that would involve, seemed absolutely necessary. But who should erect a ladder to the stars, or draw them down from the sky within man's reach? The one indispensable thing was also the one thing impossible.
If, next year, we were to learn that some miraculous Ericsson or Edison had established a practicable route to the planet Mars, and that this neighbor of ours in the solar system was found to be replete with all the things that we most want and can least easily get,--were such news to reach us, we might comprehend the sensation created in the Europe of 1492, four centuries ago, when it received the information that a certain Christopher Columbus had discovered a brand new continent, overflowing with gold and jewels, on the other side of the Atlantic. The impossible had happened. Our globe was not the petty sphere that it had been assumed to be. There was room in it for everybody, and a fortune for the picking up. And all the world, with Spain in the van, prepared to move on El Dorado. A whiff of the fresh Western air blew in all nostrils, and re-animated the moribund body of civilization. The stimulus of Columbus' achievement was felt in every condition of human life and phase of human activity. Mankind once more saw a future, and bound up its loins to take advantage of it. Literature felt the electric touch, and blossomed in the unmatched geniuses of the Elizabethan age. Science ceased to reason à priori, and began to investigate and classify facts. Human liberty began to be conscious of thews and sinews, soon to be tested in the struggle of the Netherlands against Philip II. of Spain, and, later, in that of the people of England against their own Charles Stuart. Religion was heard to mutter something about the rights of private conscience, and anon the muttering took form in the heroic protest of the man of Eisleben. It was like the awakening in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, in the fairy-tale. Columbus had kissed the lips of the Princess America, and at once the long-pent stream of old-world life dashed onward like a cataract.
A new world! Four hundred years have passed, and the New World is less a novelty than it was. We have begun to suspect that no given number of square miles of land, no eloquence and