's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt. It burns
in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
Stuart Mill.

The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this revolution, men like
Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
began. They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people
disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations
whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?

This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has
arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream. Thus it has
arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
hearts of T