when within
the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa. The
resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
themselves upon the mind. And these distinctions mark the divergence
between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
Britain. Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
Dante.

LECTURE II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL

[_Tuesday, May_ 15_th_, 1900]

Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
preliminary study. Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
generations. But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
a contemporary of the remotest ages. The beam of light, however far
into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
whence he came. As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
Divine grows more, not less insistent. Each moment indeed is rooted in
the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
sovereignty,