There is a certain quality attaching alike to thought and expression and action, for which we may borrow the name of grandeur.  It has been noticed, for instance, that Bacon strikes and impresses us, not merely by the substantial merit of what he achieved, but still more by a certain greatness of scheme and conception.  This quality is not a mere idle decoration.  It is not a theatrical artifice of mask or buskin, to impose upon us unreal impressions of height and dignity.  The added greatness is real.  Height of aim and nobility of expression are true forces.  They grow to be an obligation upon us.  A lofty sense of personal worth is one of the surest elements of greatness.  That the lion should love to masquerade in the ass’s skin is not modesty and reserve, but imbecility and degradation.  And that England should wrap herself in the robe of small causes and mean reasons is the more deplorable, because there is no nation in the world the substantial elements of whose power are so majestic and imperial as our own.  Our language is the most widely spoken of all tongues, its literature is second to none in variety and power.  Our people, whether English or American, have long ago superseded the barbarous device of dictator and Caesar by the manly arts of self-government.  We understand that peace and industry are the two most indispensable conditions of modern civilisation, and we draw the lines of our policy in accordance with such a conviction.  We have had imposed upon us by the unlucky prowess of our ancestors the task of ruling a vast number of millions of alien dependents.  We undertake it with a disinterestedness, and execute it with a skill of administration, to which history supplies no parallel, and which, even if time should show that the conditions of the problem were insoluble, will still remain for ever admirable.  All these are elements of true pre-eminence.  They are calculated to inspire us with the loftiest consciousness of national life.  They ought to clothe our voice with authority, to nerve our action by generous resolution, and to fill our counsels with weightiness and power.

Within the last forty years England has lost one by one each of those enthusiasms which may have been illusions,—­some of them undoubtedly were so,—­but which at least testified to the existence among us, in a very considerable degree, of a vivid belief in the possibility of certain broad general theories being true and right, as well as in the obligation of making them lights to practical conduct and desire.  People a generation ago had eager sympathy with Hungary, with Italy, with Poland, because they were deeply impressed by the doctrine of nationalities.  They had again a generous and energetic hatred of such an institution as the negro slavery of America, because justice and humanity and religion were too real and potent forces within their breasts to allow them to listen to those political considerations by which American statesmen used to