his life and lift him on an ample pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism.  What stirs the hope and moves the aspiration of our Englishman?  Surely nothing either in the heavens above or on the earth beneath.  The English are as a people little susceptible in the region of the imagination.  But they have done good work in the world, acquired a splendid historic tradition of stout combat for good causes, founded a mighty and beneficent empire; and they have done all this notwithstanding their deficiencies of imagination.  Their lands have been the home of great and forlorn causes, though they could not always follow the transcendental flights of their foreign allies and champions.  If Englishmen were not strong in imagination, they were what is better and surer, strong in their hold of the great emancipating principles.  What great political cause, her own or another’s, is England befriending to-day?  To say that no great cause is left, is to tell us that we have reached the final stage of human progress, and turned over the last leaf in the volume of human improvements.  The day when this is said and believed marks the end of a nation’s life.  Is it possible that, after all, our old protestant spirit, with its rationality, its austerity, its steady political energy, has been struck with something of the mortal fatigue that seizes catholic societies after their fits of revolution?

We need not forget either the atrocities or the imbecilities which mark the course of modern politics on the Continent.  I am as keenly alive as any one to the levity of France, and the [Greek:  hubris] of Germany.  It may be true that the ordinary Frenchman is in some respects the victim of as poor an egoism as that of the ordinary Englishman; and that the American has no advantage over us in certain kinds of magnanimous sentiment.  What is important is the mind and attitude, not of the ordinary man, but of those who should be extraordinary.  The decisive sign of the elevation of a nation’s life is to be sought among those who lead or ought to lead.  The test of the health of a people is to be found in the utterances of those who are its spokesmen, and in the action of those whom it accepts or chooses to be its chiefs.  We have to look to the magnitude of the issues and the height of the interests which engage its foremost spirits.  What are the best men in a country striving for?  And is the struggle pursued intrepidly and with a sense of its size and amplitude, or with creeping foot and blinking eye?  The answer to these questions is the answer to the other question, whether the best men in the country are small or great.  It is a commonplace that the manner of doing things is often as important as the things done.  And it has been pointed out more than once that England’s most creditable national action constantly shows itself so poor and mean in expression that the rest of Europe can discern nothing in it but craft and sinister interest.  Our public opinion is often rich in wisdom, but we lack the courage of our wisdom.  We execute noble achievements, and then are best pleased to find shabby reasons for them.