But when you remember
what you have read in Chapter I you will see that the countries at the
Asiatic end of the Mediterranean, though now called the Near East, were
then the Far West, because emigrants from the older lands of Asia had
gone no farther than this twelve thousand years ago. Then, as you read
the present chapter, you will see emigrants and colonies moving farther
and farther west along the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic shores of
Europe, until, at last, two thousand years before Columbus, the new Far
West consisted of those very shores of Spain and Portugal, France and
the British Isles, from which the whole New Western World of North and
South America was to be settled later on. The Atlantic shores of
Europe, and not the Mediterranean shores of Asia and of Egypt, are
called here "The First Far West" because the first really Western
people grew up in Europe and became quite different from all the
Eastern peoples. The Second Far West, two thousand years later, was
America itself.
_Westward Ho!_ is the very good name of a book about adventures in
America when this Second Far West was just beginning.
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