re; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in
the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish
now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
the recorded annals of man.

Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four
generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.

In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national
consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
race, imparting to it fo