The Nemesis of Nations Studies in History

THE NEMESIS OF NATIONSCHAPTER IINTRODUCTIONThe deeper our study of human history the more bewildered becomes our sense of the vast entanglement of the world's affairs. When the annals of mankind open we discover a number of communities apparently dwelling in isolation, but as we become familiar with their racial characteristics, their religions, their languages, and their laws we begin to detect signs not merely of contact but of kinship. Just as the frontier between Europe and Asia is artificial, so, many of the boundaries which divide nations and races are seen to be unreal. Long before history began to be written great racial amalgamations had occurred, and Asiatic types had appeared in Europe, and European types had appeared in Asia. Moreover, there was a time when Europe, Asia, and Africa formed a single continent. Geological evidence proves that Sicily, for instance, is part of a broken bridge which once united Africa and Europe, and that at Gibraltar the ATable of Contents CONTE