istory. But England,
forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest,
has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the
present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to
become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the
master-power of the planet.

The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her
dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted
in its recollections. _Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad
auras_,--if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may
be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose
ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the
end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the
horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report
it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of
Leo.

Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread
of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by
its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge
drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular
legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England
boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the
least, does not love us.

An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a
secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors
in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of
stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's
hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty
announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never
again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its
Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a
miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the
leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the
bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished
fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States"
could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A _Te Deum_ in
Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of
what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.

If the comparati