ich give to
the English race its supremacy in the stern art of labour, which has
enabled it to thrive as no other can on inhospitable shores, and which
(although no great people has less of the bloodthirsty craving for glory
and an army of 50,000 English soldiers has never been seen in battle)
caused Napoleon to exclaim, as he rode away from Waterloo, "It has
always been the same since Crecy."

Therefore, if there is reason for pride in the past, there is more for
hope in the time to come. Our advantages increase, while other nations
fear their neighbours or covet their neighbours' goods. Anomalies and
defects there are, fewer and less intolerable, if not less flagrant than
of old.

But I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that Heaven's light illuminates,
that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you
have accompanied me over the dreary and heart-breaking course by which
men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is
still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van
of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the
future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same
thing that shall be.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth
Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 28th May 1877.]

[Footnote 4: [Poynet, in his _Treatise on Political Power_.]]

III

SIR ERSKINE MAY'S DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE[5]

Scarcely thirty years separate the Europe of Guizot and Metternich from
these days of universal suffrage both in France and in United Germany;
when a condemned insurgent of 1848 is the constitutional Minister of
Austria; when Italy, from the Alps to the Adriatic, is governed by
friends of Mazzini; and statesmen who recoiled from the temerities of
Peel have doubled the electoral constituency of England. If the
philosopher who proclaimed the law that democratic progress is constant
and irrepressible had lived to see old age, he would have been startled
by the fulfilment of his prophecy. Throughout these years of
revolutionary change Sir Thomas Erskine May has been more closely and
constantly connected with the centre of public affairs than any other
Englishman, and his place, during most of the time, has been at the
table of the House of Commons, where he has sat, like Canute, and
watched the rising tide. Few could be better prepared to be the
historian of European Democracy tha