xpression of this transition, I should
select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an
Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history
at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the
traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His
literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if
his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none
durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in
constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
on violence, but on justice and freedom. This ideal influences the
action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the
seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century
we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
of Cromwell as "a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
not consciously, not