deliberately.

In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in
the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal
which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last
speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2] The ideal makes
great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of
the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown
conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It
removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great
renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern
politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.

Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.