to the races we call obtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and cheaply idle living to be found.  In meeting the national evils which are brought upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no more immediate hope or resource than that of striving after fuller national excellence, which must consist in the moulding of more excellent individual natives.  The tendency of things is towards the quicker or slower fusion of races.  It is impossible to arrest this tendency:  all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius—­the deep suckers of healthy sentiment.  Such moderating and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort.  And it is in this sense that the modern insistance on the idea of Nationalities has value.  That any people at once distinct and coherent enough to form a state should be held in subjection by an alien antipathetic government has been becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indignation; and in virtue of this, at least one great State has been added to European councils.  Nobody now complains of the result in this case, though far-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by discrimination.  We have to consider who are the stifled people and who the stiflers before we can be sure of our ground.

The only point in this connection on which Englishmen are agreed is, that England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule.  The fiery resolve to resist invasion, though with an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people.  Why?  Because there is a national life in our veins.  Because there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it.  Because we too have our share—­perhaps a principal share—­in that spirit of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations, and, like the Muses, is the offspring of memory.

Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be the discerning and adjustment of opposite claims.  But the end can hardly be achieved by urging contradictory reproaches, and instead of labouring after discernment as a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burst forth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentally and afterwards justified by personal predilection.  Not only John Gilpin and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of opinion that their preference or dislike of Russians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent, perhaps, on hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of the Eastern Question; even in a higher range of intellect and enthusiasm we find a distribution of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different blood or votaries of differing religions,