ABSTRACT
The world has several times come in sight of a liberal universal empire, under which every form of moral order might be developed by those communities to which it was native or congenial. Yet neither universality nor stability has ever been achieved. An Alexander, with his young genius and courage, stretched universal dominion to the eastern limits geographically possible in that age: to-day, with the ease and thoroughness of modern intercourse, the world is positively crying for a universal government, and almost creating it against all national wills. And Alexander was not too Hellenic, not too disrespectful of barbarians, to have been accepted by Picts and Ethiopians, by Chinese and American Indians, if he had conquered them all, as their providential overlord. But stability was wholly wanting. Macedon was nothing, and that expeditionary 454force, spread over the continents, was not a power capable of controlling them, or of recruiting itself.
