lions, of extending the word People to include every man of British
blood, was a great, a breathless hazard. Might not a mob arise like
that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage
added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making
the guillotine a welcome release?

But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it
is a winning hazard. To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the
Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,
from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in
its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on
fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of
Sidney and Wolfe. Has not the present war given a harvest of
instances? The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death
threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell
message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of
Abraham--"Have we won?" Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,
dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me
aside, men, and go on!" Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and
summoned at great odds to surrender. "Never!" was the brief imperative
response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot
through the heart, he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks,
this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the
enfranchised masses.

Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular
nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,
exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the
self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war
by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their
blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had
sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it
with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!

Sec. 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM

Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within
the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race
are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts
of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved
purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,
disregarding the judgment of men, re