The early history of this people is marked by
two things:

( 1 ) Town and village organizations, nurseries of law, order, and
self-dependence, nuclei of power, capable of indefinite expansion,
leading directly to a free and a strong government, the breeders of civil
liberty.

( 2 ) Individualism in religion, Protestantism in the widest sense: I
mean by this, cultivation of the individual conscience as against
authority. This trait was as marked in this sturdy people in Catholic
England as it is in Protestant England. It is in the blood. England never
did submit to Rome, not even as France did, though the Gallic Church held
out well. Take the struggle of Henry II. and the hierarchy. Read the
fight with prerogative all along. The English Church never could submit.
It is a shallow reading of history to attribute the final break with Rome
to the unbridled passion of Henry VIII.; that was an occasion only: if it
had not been that, it would have been something else.

Here we have the two necessary traits in the character of a great people:
the love and the habit of civil liberty and religious conviction and
independence. Allied to these is another trait--truthfulness. To speak
the truth in word and action, to the verge of bluntness and offense--and
with more relish sometimes because it is individually obnoxious and
unlovely--is an English trait, clearly to be traced in the character of
this people, notwithstanding the equivocations of Elizabethan diplomacy,
the proverbial lying of English shopkeepers, and the fraudulent
adulteration of English manufactures. Not to lie is perhaps as much a
matter of insular pride as of morals; to lie is unbecoming an Englishman.
When Captain Burnaby was on his way to Khiva he would tolerate no
Oriental exaggeration of his army rank, although a higher title would
have smoothed his way and added to his consideration. An English official
who was a captive at Bokhara (or Khiva) was offered his life by the Khan
if he would abjure the Christian faith and say he was a Moslem; but he
preferred death rather than the advantage of a temporary equivocation. I
do not suppose that he was a specially pious man at home or that he was a
martyr to religious principle, but for the moment Christianity stood for
England and English honor and civilization. I can believe that a rough
English sailor, who had not used a sacred name, except in vain, since he
said his prayer at his mother's knee, accepted death under