e United States and as, essentially, the people of the United States
still remain to-day. Each of those bands will follow its own path and
work its own miracles--whether greater than that which the people of the
United States has wrought or not, only later generations will know. Each
of these, though British still and always, is launched on its individual
career; and it is not of them that we are speaking now, but of the
Englishmen who remain at home, of the present-day population of the
British Isles.

What would be the result if suddenly the limits of the British Isles
were to be miraculously expanded? What would happen if the floor of the
ocean heaved itself up and Great Britain awoke to find the coast of
Cornwall and Wales mysteriously reaching westward, the Irish Sea no more
than a Hudson River which barely kept the shores of Lancashire and
Cumberland from touching Ireland,--an Ireland of which the western
coast--the coast of Munster and Connaught--was prolonged a thousand
leagues towards the setting sun; while the west coast of the north of
Scotland, Ross and Sutherland, had absorbed the Hebrides and stretched
unbroken into two thousand miles of plain and mountain range--Britain no
longer but Atlantis come again and all British soil? It was to nothing
less miraculous that the thirteen original States fell heir. And what
would be the effect on the British race?

Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie
teeming with game, pasture for millions of cattle, wheat land and corn
land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;--the
wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to
do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;--farms,
not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the
unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened,
not materially only, but in its moral qualities,--that Englishmen in
another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful
people but a healthier, lustier, nobler? How then are we to suppose that
just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other
British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their
wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a
quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it
after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are
you going to c