IT IS AS LITTLE INEVITABLE

that the West should have declined, as that Asia, or the Middle East, should have risen to threaten it again.

There was nothing inevitable about it.

In fact, in an age of so called enlightenment, and its aftermath, only in the West,  it should have been one of the most important and glaringly obvious things, possible to occur, with their detailed encyclopedic and critical knowledge of the entire sweep of history, to men in European governments open to talent.