f
Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army
bring? Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
_auto-da-fe_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These
things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by
day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fe_; it brings with it, and not to one
people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_elargissez Dieu!_"--to
liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
humanity, and in its dealings with race distin