worth while for them to leave their home occupations; and whether that be a good or an evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an almost inexhaustible supply of volunteers. What a new and awful scene for the world’s drama, did such a nation as this once set before itself, steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest. Even now, waging war as she has done, as it were, ἐν παρεργᾷ, thinking war too unimportant a part of her work to employ on it her highest intellects, her flag has advanced in the last fifty years over more vast and richer tracts than that of any European nation upon earth. What keeps her from the dream which lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome? This: that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learned to look on that of other people’s as sacred also; and since, in the fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unrighteous dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more that true military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of attack; not in waging war, but being able to wage it; and has gone on her true mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the whole, and more humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering only when it was necessary to put down the lawlessness of the savage few for the well-being of the civilised many. This has been her idea; she may have confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese wars; for who can always be true to the light within him? But this has been her idea; and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a virgin land for now eight hundred years.