ations. They may be committed by kings and ministers
to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
{228} religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
starting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or any
great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an
accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.

Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
Madras? Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
been born in Prussia? England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
it has found it. Leaders give the form. Would England be crying
forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
commanding personality, working in one direction? Certainly not. She
would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
{229} _Allemands_. Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game. The lesson
will not be forgotten. Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they--

"will never do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been"--

of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.

The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The
community _may_ evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this
or that ferment decides in which way it _shall