essay reveals it to the latter himself and
to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the
seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is
the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying
motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The
eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal
from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the
present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
Britain.

It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often
convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
itself. And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
speeches for a deliberate e