37 concessions, monopolies, and land and mine grabbing operations, always availed themselves of the instrumentality of foreigners. Corruption contaminated the bones of both. Inordinate love of wealth is an infirmity and a symptom of death. Rome succumbed amid the splendors of Petronius and the luxuries of Luculus. Anthony forgot his country in the gardens of Cleopatra.
XI.
What is the visible trend of evolution in the present age and what is the role of the United States?
The rivers of the earth always seek slopes, basins, vales, gullies or watercourses in which to flow to the sea; and in order that the law of social movement might bear more likeness to the laws of the physical world, humanity also selects seas, rivers, canals, so that it may all the more easily transport itself from one place to another, peopling the earth and contributing to the progress of the race.
From most remote times, the human tide has coursed through seas and rivers best adapted to navigation and the transportation of men and merchandise, or of ammunition for use in the work of conquest. It might be said that facilities of communication have directed the inarch of the social world.
The Aryans jumped from the plains of Pamir to the Ganges and the Indus, later crossing the Indian sea and the Mediterranean to establish themselves in Greece and Rome; the Hebrews erected their tents on the shores of the Euphrates; and by a singular circumstance, truly felicitous for the study of sociology, the most powerful