This is from “The Outline of History / The Whole Story of Man” by H.G. Wells.  It will appear in the May 2015 issue of The Stovall Journal.  I’m sorry to all you Stovall’s who are a member of the Stovall Family Association and will receive the journal, but I found this to be so interesting that I couldn’t resist posting.

This is the mood of European leaders after they begin to comprehend the discovery and exploration of the lands across the Atlantic Ocean.

“The discovery of the huge continent of America, thinly inhabited, underdeveloped, and admirably adapted for European settlement and exploitation, the simultaneous discovery of great areas of unworked country south of the torrid equatorial regions of Africa that had hitherto limited European knowledge, and the gradual realization of vast island regions in the Eastern seas, as yet untouched by Western civilization, was a presentation of opportunity to mankind unprecedented in all history.  It was as if the people of Europe had come into some splendid legacy.  Their world had suddenly quadrupled.”