heir spears into
pruning-hooks, and men were not to learn war any more. And this was on
the eve of the Crimea--the most ruinous, the most cruel, and the least
justifiable of all campaigns. In one corner of the world or another, the
war-drum has throbbed almost without intermission from that day to this.

But when we turn to other aspirations the retrospect is more cheerful.
Slavery has been entirely abolished, and, with all due respect to Mr.
George Curzon, is not going to be re-established under the British flag.
The punishment of death, rendered infinitely more impressive, and
therefore more deterrent, by its withdrawal from the public gaze, is
reserved for offences which even Romilly would not have condoned. The
diminution of crime is an acknowledged fact. Better laws and improved
institutions--judicial, political, social, sanitary--we flatter
ourselves that we may claim. National Education dates from 1870, and its
operation during a quarter of a century has changed the face of the
industrial world. Queen Victoria in her later years reigns over an
educated people.

Of the most important theme of all--our national advance in religion,
morality, and the principles of humane living--I have spoken in previous
chapters, and this is not the occasion for anything but the briefest
recapitulation. "Where is boasting? It is excluded." There is much to be
thankful for, much to encourage: something to cause anxiety, and nothing
to justify bombast. No one believes more profoundly than I do in the
providential mission of the English race, and the very intensity of my
faith in that mission makes me even painfully anxious that we should
interpret it aright. Men who were undergraduates at Oxford in the
'seventies learned the interpretation, in words of unsurpassable beauty,
from John Ruskin:--

"There is a destiny now possible to us--the highest ever set before a
nation, to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a
race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in
temper, but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey. We
have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now
finally betray or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an
inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of
noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with
splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour,
should be the most o