inheritance. The future is gained
by the same temper in which the past is held; so that, if the past is
secure, the future is also: none the less because the past seems so
irrevocably built, but rather in consequence of that, because it betrays
the method of the builders.

These two characteristics, apparently irreconcilable, are really
organic, and come of position, climate, diet, and slowly amalgamated
races of men. Herne's oak in Windsor Forest and the monarchy in Windsor
Castle grew on the same terms. Branch after branch the oak has fallen,
till on the last day of the summer of 1863 the wind brought the
shattered remnant to the ground. Whether the monarchy decay like this or
not, it has served to shelter a great people; and the English people is
still vital with its slow robustness, and is good for depositing its
annual rings these thousand years.

Let us look a little more closely at this apparent contradiction.

The superficial view of England breeds a kind of hopelessness in the
mind of the observer. He says to himself,--"All these stereotyped habits
and opinions, these ways of thinking, writing, building, living, and
dying, seem irrepealable; and the worst fault of their comparative
excellence is, that they appear determined not to yield another inch to
improvement." The Englishman says that America is forever bullying with
her restlessness and innovation. The American might at first say that
England bullied by never budging,--bullied the future, and every
rational or humane suggestion, by planting a portly attitude to
challenge the New Jerusalem in an overbearing chest voice, through which
the timid clarion of the angels is not heard.

If an observer knows anything of the history of England, he cannot deny
that vast changes have been made in every department of life: domestic
habits, social economics, the courts of law, the Church, the liberty of
the press and of speech, in short, all the roads, whether material or
mental, by which mankind travels to its ultimate purpose, have been
graded, widened, solidly equipped and built. A thousand years have
converted three or four races into one people,--and all that time and
weather have made upon it such strong imprints that you cannot see the
difference between a pyramid and a cathedral sooner than you can the
distinctive nationality of England. But for that very reason you despair
of it, just as you do of a cathedral which cannot be adapted to the
wants of a new