ty for absorbing
slightly foreign elements and moulding them into conformity with a
political type that was first wrought out through centuries of effort on
British soil; and this capacity it has shown perhaps in a heightened
degree in the peculiar circumstances in which it has been placed in
America. The American has absorbed considerable quantities of closely
kindred European blood, but he is rapidly assimilating it all, and in
his political habits and aptitudes he remains as thoroughly English as
his forefathers in the days of De Montfort, or Hampden, or Washington.
Premising this, we may go on to consider some aspects of the work which
the English race has done and is doing in the world, and we need not
feel discouraged if, in order to do justice to the subject, we have to
take our start far back in ancient history. We shall begin, it may be
said, somewhere near the primeval chaos, and though we shall indeed
stop short of the day of judgment, we shall hope at all events to reach
the millennium.

Our eloquent friends of the Paris dinner-party seem to have been
strongly impressed with the excellence of enormous political aggregates.
We, too, approaching the subject from a different point of view, have
been led to see how desirable it is that self-governing groups of men
should be enabled to work together in permanent harmony and on a great
scale. In this kind of political integration the work of civilization
very largely consists. We have seen how in its most primitive form
political society is made up of small self-governing groups that are
perpetually at war with one another. Now the process of change which we
call civilization means quite a number of things. But there is no doubt
that on its political side it means primarily the gradual substitution
of a state of peace for a state of war. This change is the condition
precedent for all the other kinds of improvement that are connoted by
such a term as "civilization." Manifestly the development of industry is
largely dependent upon the cessation or restriction of warfare; and
furthermore, as the industrial phase of civilization slowly supplants
the military phase, men's characters undergo, though very slowly, a
corresponding change. Men become less inclined to destroy life or to
inflict pain; or--to use the popular terminology which happens here to
coincide precisely with that of the Doctrine of Evolution--they become
less _brutal_ and more _humane_. Obviously then t