Let us take politics, for example. What is the state of the case with
us, if we look at national life in its broadest aspect? A German has his
dream of a great fatherland which shall not only be one and
consolidated, but shall in due season win freedom for itself, and be as
a sacred hearth whence others may borrow the warmth of freedom and order
for themselves. A Spaniard has his vision either of militant loyalty to
God and the saints and the exiled line of his kings, or else of devotion
to the newly won liberty and to the raising up of his fallen nation. An
American, in the midst of the political corruption which for the moment
obscures the great democratic experiment, yet has his imagination
kindled by the size and resources of his land, and his enthusiasm fired
by the high destinies which he believes to await its people in the
centuries to come. A Frenchman, republican or royalist, with all his
frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream
and aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample
pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and
moves the aspiration of our Englishman? Surely nothing either in the
heavens above or on the earth beneath. The English are as a people
little susceptible in the region of the imagination. But they have done
good work in the world, acquired a splendid historic tradition of stout
combat for good causes, founded a mighty and beneficent empire; and
they have done all this notwithstanding their deficiencies of
imagination. Their lands have been the home of great and forlorn causes,
though they could not always follow the transcendental flights of their
foreign allies and champions. If Englishmen were not strong in
imagination, they were what is better and surer, strong in their hold of
the great emancipating principles. What great political cause, her own
or another's, is England befriending to-day? To say that no great cause
is left, is to tell us that we have reached the final stage of human
progress, and turned over the last leaf in the volume of human