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The days were coming when the People was to have more to say than the pope in regard to the disposition and arrangements of certain large districts of this planet. While the world-empire, which still excited so much dismay, was yielding to constant corrosion, another empire, created by well-directed toil and unflinching courage, was steadily rising out of the depths.

With the French and English sovereigns united with the Provinces, the cause of the Reformation might triumph, the Spanish world-empire be annihilated, national independence secured. Henry assured the Ambassador that the treaty of Vervins was indispensable, but that he would never desert his old allies.

Both were convinced that the emotion of political solidarity was impossible between individuals of consciously different national types. The attempt, therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneity and solidarity either to the inhabitants of a modern world-empire as a whole, or to the members of the dominant race in it, disguises the real facts and adds to the danger of war.

But the younger generation in Germany was far from sharing this view. It was determined to win for Germany a world-empire, and in 1884 and the following years rather late in the day, when most of the more desirable territories were already occupied it forced Bismarck to annex large areas.

Were after generations to learn, only after curious research, of a pretender who once called himself, to the amusement of his contemporaries, Henry the Fourth of France; or was the world-empire for which so many armies were marshalled, so many ducats expended, so many falsehoods told, to prove a bubble after all? Time was to show.

The whole chivalry of Gascony and Guienne, the vast swarm of industrious and hardy Huguenot artisans, the Netherland rebels, the great English Queen, stood ready to support the cause of French nationality, and of all nationalities, against a threatening world-empire, of religious liberty against sacerdotal absolutism, and the crown of a King, whose only merit had hitherto been to acquiesce in a religious toleration dictated to him by others, against those who derided his authority and insulted his person.

It has been interpreted as the mountain of temptation from which Satan showed the kingdom of this world. It is the birthplace of Caesardom and the modern idea of world-imperialism. It was once the seat of world-empire, and remains even now the rock of the Church. For many all roads still lead to the Cathedral of St. Peter's as to the most representative temple in Christendom.

Had Providence permitted a fusion of the two races, it is, possible, from their position, and from the geographical and historical link which they would have afforded to the dominant tribes of Europe, that a world-empire might have been the result, different in many respects from any which has ever arisen. Speculations upon what might have been are idle.

Verdugo would rather have sent thirty thousand men to save the front door of his great province than three hundred. But every available man and few enough of them they were had been sent out of the Netherlands, to defend the world-empire in its outposts of Normandy and Brittany.

The claims of the man whom his supporters already called Henry the Fourth of France being thus disposed of, Philip then again alluded with his usual minuteness to the various combinations which he had formed for the tranquillity and good government of that kingdom and of the other provinces of his world-empire.