t England is not nationalist. If the English believed in
England as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing for
it but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other,
and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would be attained by a
great simplification and impoverishment of the world. But the English do
not believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come of mixed
blood, and have been accustomed for many long centuries to settle their
differences by compromise and mutual accommodation. They do not inquire
too curiously into a man's descent if he shares their ideas. They have
shown again and again that they prefer a tolerant and intelligent
foreigner to rule over them rather than an obstinate and wrong-headed
man of native origin. The earliest strong union of the various parts of
England was achieved by William the Norman, a man of French and
Scandinavian descent. Our native-born king, Charles the First, was put
to death by his people; his son, James the Second, was banished, and the
Dutchman, William the Third, who had proved himself a statesman and
soldier of genius in his opposition to Louis the Fourteenth, was elected
to the throne of England. The fierce struggles of the seventeenth
century, between Royalists and Parliamentarians, between Cavaliers and
Puritans, were settled at last, not by the destruction of either party,
but by the stereotyping of the dispute in the milder and more tolerable
shape of the party system. The only people we have ever shown ourselves
unwilling to tolerate are the people who will tolerate no one but their
own kind. We hate all Acts of Uniformity with a deadly hatred. We are
careful for the rights of minorities. We think life should be made
possible, and we do not object to its being made happy, for dissenters.
Voltaire, the acutest French mind of his age, remarked on this when he
visited England in 1726. 'England', he says, 'is the country of sects.
"In my father's house are many mansions".... Although the Episcopalians
and the Presbyterians are the two dominant sects in Great Britain, all
the others are welcomed there, and live together very fairly, whilst
most of the preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a
Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Enter the London Exchange, a place much more
worthy of respect than most Courts, and you see assembled for the
benefit of mankind representatives of all nations. There the Jew, the
Mohammedan, and the Chr