CHAPTER XX.

ENGLAND WORKS FOR HERSELF. THE WORLD OWES HER NOTHING.

"If," as M. Renan says,[6] "those nations which have an exceptional fact in their history expiate this fact by long sufferings and pay for it with their national existence--if the nations that have created unique things by which the world profits often die victims of their achievements," England may hope to live a considerable time yet, for everything that she undertakes is national, never universal. She works for herself and herself alone. Whenever she is asked to co-operate in the execution of a great project of universal interest, she refuses pointblank, unless it appears quite clear to her that she alone will reap the profits and honors of the undertaking. An Englishman's sphere of action is always England and her colonies; his only aim, British interests--two magic words to his ears.

If the Channel Tunnel could be made so that it could only be used by the English, it would be commenced to-morrow.

Lord Beaconsfield pronounced patriotism to be the most rational form of egotism. Would to Heaven it might be so interpreted in France!

When shall we, in France, cease to strive after the extraordinary and the universal? When shall we cease to concern ourselves about the happiness of the whole human race and, minding our own business, undertake only the possible and the practical? When shall we cease to become inventors and be men of business?

There is not much discovered in England nowadays, except new ways of dodging the arch-enemy.

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Yet it was Newton who discovered the infinitesimal calculus and the laws of universal gravitation. Yet it was England that produced Shakespeare, the sublimest example of the Creator's handiwork. Yet it was Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood. But now England is entirely given over to business; she has no time to throw away upon inventions.

For that matter, why should England go in for inventing? She has money and a genius for commerce, and, possessing these, can do without inventors, who, as a rule, die in the workhouse, with the satisfaction of knowing that shrewd men of business have made fortunes out of their discoveries.

This has always been so. Even the sublime and Divine Thinker expiated with an ignominious death the invention of a theory which, but for the meddling of speculators, would have insured the happiness of the world. To-day He can contemplate from His celestial throne, the bishops coming out of their palaces in luxurious carriages to go to the House of Lords and vote against the opening of museums on Sundays, or on their way to the Mansion House to feast with the Lord Mayor, who gives better dinners than were to be had in Galilee, I assure you.

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The world is made up of fools and knaves, such was the judgment passed upon mankind by Thomas Carlyle, the great English historian, a rough and dyspeptic philosopher, who himself, however, was neither a knave nor a fool.

This writer, who passed his life in insulting his countrymen one after another, who could make love to his wife by correspondence when she was far away, but who never found an amiable word to say to her when she was near, this same Thomas Carlyle has calumniated the world. Where should we be without the few disinterested heroes who have devoted themselves to the amelioration of their fellow-creatures, and who, in return, have received but poverty and prison, torture and death? The men who have suffered for country, religion, science, liberty; are these Carlyle's fools?