Chapter 4

The present writer claims to belong as little to the Pessimist as to the Bombastic school--to borrow Mr. Seeley's phrase--unless it is to be a Pessimist to seek a foothold in positive conditions and to insist on facing hard facts. The sense of English kinship is as lively in us as in other people, and we have the same pride in English energy, resolution, and stoutness of heart, whether these virtues show themselves in the young countries or the old. We agree in desiring a strong and constant play between the thoughts, the ideals, the institutions, of Englishmen in the island home and Englishmen who have carried its rational freedom and its strenuous industry to new homes in every sea. Those who in our domestic politics are most prepared to welcome democratic changes can have least prejudice against countrymen who are showing triumphantly how order and prosperity are not incompatible with a free Church, with free schools, with the payment of members, with manhood suffrage, and with the absence of a hereditary chamber. Neither are we misled by a spurious analogy between a colony ready for independence and a grown-up son ready to enter life on his own account; nor by Turgot's comparison of colonies to fruit which hangs on the tree only till it is ripe. We take our stand on Mr. Seeley's own plain principles that 'all political unions exist for the good of their members, and should be just as large, and no larger, as they can be without ceasing to be beneficial.' The inquiry is simply whether the good of the members of our great English union all over the world will be best promoted by aiming at an artificial centralisation, or by leaving as much room as possible for the expansion of individual communities along lines and in channels which they may spontaneously cut out for themselves. If our ideal is a great Roman Empire, which shall be capable by means of fleets and armies of imposing its will upon the world, then it is satisfactory to think, for the reasons above given, that the ideal is an unattainable one. Any closer union of the British Empire attempted with this object would absolutely fail. The unwieldy weapon would break in our hands. The ideal is as impracticable as it is puerile and retrograde.

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Transcriber's Notes:

The transcriber made the following changes to the text to correct obvious errors:

1. p. 329, "embarassments" changed to "embarrassments"

End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3), by John Morley