The origins and destiny of imperial Britain and nineteenth century Europe

Front matter

-7*,

V^

THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

Preface

The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in May, June, and July, 1900. Their immediate inspiration was the war in South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the ideals and deeds of the present hour. The last chapter — " Nineteenth Century Europe" — was written by Mr. Cramb for the Daily News Special Number for December 31st, 1900. In it he presents a survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during the nineteenth century. He outlines the development of the New German Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present deathstruggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe. The future roles of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the author.

When the book first appeared, Mr. Cramb wrote that he " had been induced to publish these reflections by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might not be without service to

PREFACE

his country." His lectures are now reprinted in the hope that they may be " not without service " to the whole EngHsh-speaking world.

CHAPTER II The Development of the Political Ideal . 25

i. of the action of states and of individuals 2.j

2. the law of tragedy as applied to history . 3 1

3. the law of tragedy : its second aspect . . 42

CHAPTER HI

The Development of the Religious Ideal . 57

1. religion and imperialism 58

2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY . 6o

CONTENTS

PAGE

3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS 66

4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH

REFORMATION 70

5. THE TESTIMONY OT THE PAST: A FINAL CON-

SIDERATION 83

CHAPTER IV 1. historical significance of the war in

south AFRICA 92

3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY lOI

4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM . . . .Ill

5. MILITARISM 113

CHAPTER V i. the place of war in world-history . . .117

2. definition of war 126

3. count tolstoi and carlyle upon war . . i29

4. count tolstoi as representative of the

slavonic genius i34

CONTENTS

PAGE

5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR . . . I39

6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE . . . .143

7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR 1 54

CHAPTER VI It The Vicissitudes of States and Empires . 159

1. THE metaphysical ORIGIN OF THE STATE . . l6o

2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART 167

3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF

RETRIBUTION 1/3

4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY . 1 78

5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE " FALL OF AN EM-

CHAPTER Vn

The Destiny of Imperial Britain and the Destiny of Man 198

1. the present stage in the history of im-

perial BRITAIN 200

2. the destiny of man 207

3. the four periods of modern history and

their ideals 211

5. the " ACT " and the " THOUGHT "... 227

6. Britain's world-mission: the witness of

the dead to the mandate of the pres- ENT 230

CONTENTS PART III

Chapter VIII Chapter Page

1. DOMINION" OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY . . . 243

2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM . 257

3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE 2/2

PART I THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST

THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

Chapter I What Is Imperialism?

The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own impress on the traditions of humanity. In no period has the burden of the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately, so monotonously.

How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history of a county, proceed to write the History of the World ! And in speculation it is the Tale, the fabula, the procession of impressive incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature possesses. But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.

This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences. State papers, this endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse, the supreme instinct of this age — the ardour to know all, to experience all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of things — if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the present. The half -effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture — if these have become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present that invests them with this magic. Life has become more self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self, the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.

World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden with eternal meanings, signifi-

=^ IMPERIAL BRITAIN 3

cances, intimations, swift gleams of the Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay bare, to crystallise the moments of all these manifestations, but to discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations, whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.

Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the subject, but attempted an answer to the question — What is the place of these incidents in the universal scheme of things ? so in the treatment of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place amongst the world-empires of the past. I use the phrase " Imperial Britain," and not " British Empire," because from the latter, territorial associations are inseparable. It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and the Hke. But by " Imperial Britain " I wish to indicate the informing spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this material frame of empire. With the rise of this spirit, this consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared. The unity of Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching achievement. The aspirations of the period of the Aitfkldrung — Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte — find in this edifice their political realisation. But the incident is not unprecedented. Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made obsolete. It has affected the European State-system as the sudden unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy under Louis XIV affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent growth of Imperial Britain — so unobserved that it presents itself even now as an unreal, a transient thing — a force intrudes into the State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future, has few, if any, parallels in history.

§ I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY

What is the nature of this Consciousness ? What is its historical basis? Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?

In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 5

passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are difficult to localise. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger Robespierre — " He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Areola, two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannse, It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose of Osorius ^ does but prolong the echoes of Camo-

1 The Latin work of Osorius, De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae, appeared in 1574, two years later than Os Lusiadas. The twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and 1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens. But the hero of Osorius is Alboquerque. His affectation of Ciceronianism, the literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed with his eyes upon his subject. Seven years after the Latin, a French translation, a beautifully printed foHo from Estienne's press, was published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and others, bringing the history down to 1529.

ens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the "principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now impressing the whole earth by its majesty — the Ideal of Imperial Britain.

It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 7

or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays itself. And if the question were asked — When does monarchical or constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain? I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne, hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form indeed,. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic school of which Macaulay is coryph^us. In religion he revered the traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to the ideals of the past ; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master there. " Within that circle none durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realise — an empire resting not on violence, but on justice and freedom.

This ideal influences the action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century ; but in Chatham its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the seventeenth century, unless in a latent unconscious form, it can hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke of Cromwell as " a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but not consciously, not deliberately.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 9

In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's chef d'oeuvre, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.^ The ideal

2 The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April 2nd. Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately afterwards, rose after an allnight sitting to speak at four o'clock on Tuesday morning (April 3rd). The close of the speech is thus reported: "If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and regret. We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking in upon their lo WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

makes great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson, Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. " The Cry of the Children " derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which, after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder battleland, which at some happy period in still later times may blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of that immense continent. Then may we hope that even Africa, though last of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon us in a much earlier period of the world. Then also will Europe, participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more speedily dispelled —

illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper. Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used with a different view —

His demum exactis —

purpureo."

Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment remains, was delivered on April 27th {Pari. Hist, xxix, pp. 1134-88).

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY ii

cry of the " Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.

Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.

Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal, to frame an answer to the question — What is the nature of this ideal which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland? Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte. This is the ideal, and in the resolution deliberate and conscious to realise this ideal throughout its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny of Imperial Britain.

As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task. This is the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome. To spread the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilising power of Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon. Similarly of Rome: to subdue th"e world, to establish there her peace, governing all in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan. And in this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the necessity of realising its ideals in other races, in other peoples, lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation. The origin of these characteristics in British

Imperialism we shall examine in a later lecture. Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you in a clearer light. Observe, first of all, that it is essentially British. It is not Roman, not Hellenic. The Roman ideal moulds every form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the East, down to the eighteenth century. The theory of the mediaeval empire derives immediately from Rome. The Roman justice disguised as righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial. The Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the Paradiso.^ Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase imperium ac libertas to a Roman historian. The voluntary or accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism which it popularised is worth considering. It is false to the genius of Rome. It is not that the

3 Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the centuries which follow. To Dante he represents at once the subtleties of Jurisprudence and Theology. The Eagle's hymn in the Paradiso (Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and Mediseval Imperialism.. The essence of the entire treatise De Monorchia is in these cantos ; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person speaks, is informed by the same spirit.

phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Csesar, nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words. Imperium ac justitia he might have said; but he could never have used together the conceptions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples subdued by Rome — Spain, Gaul, Africa — received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed Rome's name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Freedom, the freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman statesman! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic, Europe consists ; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualise the conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find. The common traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero of the ^neid and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this effort of Modern Europe is realised, not only in the highest, but in the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how completely the ideals of these States are enshrined in the De Monarchia, and how closely the De Monarchia knits itself to Caesarian and to consular Rome!

The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama, is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more grandly, more simply, and with yet pro founder meanings.

Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it " rejects the Faith proffered by the visiting angel " — a Protestant Spain is impossible — but because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large, that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than life — freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart. But disaster taught Spain nothing —

As ^schylus says:

i6 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune

A shadow might overturn its height ; whilst of disaster

A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;

And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.

The embittered wisdom of ^schylus, indeed, finds in all history no more shining comment than the decHne of Spain.*

The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand

II, the internecine war of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo, Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries before by Leo III and Charlemagne.

And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull Unigenitus, the procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la Revolution : — " Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."

* Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of Spain. Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject State. Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel, John

III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe. But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry went hand in hand. To the pride of her conquistadores was added the fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests, incantations,

From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain, first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire moulded by a new ideal.

Let me illustrate this by a contrast — a contrast between two armies and what each brings to the vanquished.

Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago? That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman legions left the world, defiles from the gorges of Savoy, and division behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian who narrates that march, the approach of sorrte vast serpent, the glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage, fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army bring?

and torture-chambers, was established at Goa. The resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts, the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force themselves upon the mind. And these distinctions mark the divergence between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of Britain. Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of Dante.

i8 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

Death comes with it — death in the shape most calculated to break the resolution of the most dauntless — the rack, the solitary dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the autodtt'-fe, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the dungeon, nor the dread auto-da-fe; it brings with it, and not to one people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds, the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned generations of the past — an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, " elargisses Dieu!'' — to liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;