At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of "Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob celebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is not wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule, Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the grosser Hebrew prophecies: I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world: All nations serve thee; every foreign flood, Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames, he points to the virgin shores "beyond the vast Atlantic surge" and cries: This new world, Shook to its centre, trembles at her name: And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms. Britons, proceed, the subject deep command, Awe with your navies every hostile land. Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain: They rule the balanced world who rule the main. But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written expressly to persuade the England of 1883 _not_ to give up India and the Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truer soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions of the Hebrew bards. The Lord our God Most High, He hath made the deep as dry, He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth. But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is characteristically practical. Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience; Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own, That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.