The Church of England would have followed the Church of Ireland, and ...

The Church of England would have followed the Church of Ireland, and the Throne the Church; and a rapid extension of the suffrage would have involved the fall of the aristocracy and the redistribution of their still rich lands.

All the necessary ideas were in the air: whisperings against the Crown, more than whisperings against the Church and the Lords; against primogeniture and the aggregation of estates: and the ground-tone, always growing louder, is the discord of progress and poverty. But England, watching Paris burn, was in no mood to go too far or too fast, and a greater destiny was beginning to absorb her thought.

Mistress of India and the seas, mother of nations, she might well see in

her world-wide sovereignty the crown and demonstration

of evolution in history.' The very contraction of the world was making the thought of Greater England' more intimate and familiar, and giving to Imperial hopes and aspirations an ascendancy over domestic doubts and fears. It has always seemed to me (and I am speaking of what I remember) that, in its exaltation and in its almost Darwinian reasoning, this part of Dante's tract is a perfect rendering of the philosophic Imperialism of the end of the century; the distinction between the races, apti nati ad principari, and those apoi ad sublici; the final cause of Empire, subilciendo sibi orbem, bonum publicuns in tendit; natural disposition, natura locum et grains disposuit ad uniqsersaliter principandonn; and the

survival of the fittest in certamina and duella.

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