Twice the European mind had been carried to the verge, and twice ...

Twice the European mind had been carried to the verge, and twice it had been baffled.

The three phases are conveniently marked by Miss Martinean's Illustrations of Political Economy, Coningthy, and Bagehot's English Constitution.

In the nineteenth century it won the top and saw stretching before it that endless new world which Bacon had sighted, or imagined, where nothing need remain unknown, and for everything that is known there is something that can be done; the world of organized thought where even modern scientific man was only the rudiments of what man might be. But European currents have a way of changing their direction when they touch our shores: it was so with the Renaissance, it was so with the Reformation.

We borrowed our Party names from France and Spain; only Radical is all our own.' But the Conservative Party is a far more vital element in the State than a Parti Conservateur, and Continental Liberalism had little to teach a people who counted their freedom not by revolutions but by dynasties. 'You see,' said Mackintosh, when the latest French pamphlet on Liberty was exhibited for his admiration, 'in England we take all that for granted.' Of Continental Socialism we may say we gave as good as we took, and the Nationalism, which was to glorify the heroisms and to poison the conflicts of a century, made little appeal to a race which had no memories of foreign oppression to brood over, and is always more disposed to grudge the cost of its victories than to spend fresh money in avenging its defeats.