present the self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is ridiculous to
suppose that that quality could long be wanting in the men of a
nation which is at this moment the foremost in the work of emigration
and colonisation. If organising power and military system be, as is
said, lacking in high quarters, surely there must be organising power
enough somewhere in the greatest industrial nation upon earth, ready
to come forward when there is a real demand for it; and whatever be
the defects of our system, we are surely not as far behind Prussia or
France as Rome was behind the Carthaginians and the Greeks whom she
crushed. A few years sufficed for them to learn all they needed from
their enemies; fewer still would suffice us to learn from our
friends. Our working classes are not, like those of America, in a
state of physical comfort too great to make it worth while for them
to leave their home occupations; and whether that be a good or an
evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an almost
inexhaustible supply of volunteers. What a new and awful scene for
the world's drama, did such a nation as this once set before itself,
steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest.
Even now, waging war as she has done, as it were, [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced] thinking war too unimportant a part of her work
to employ on it her highest intellects, her flag has advanced in the
last fifty years over more vast and richer tracts than that of any
European nation upon earth. What keeps her from the dream which
lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome?

This: that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling
intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learned to
look on that of other people's as sacred also; and since, in the
fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unrighteous
dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more that