In what the promised Elysium is to consist is a little dark, but it is plain that its blessings are to be confined to “the peoples of our Queen,” and that, whatever may be the exact political condition described as being “in bondage free,” it is reached only by those who are members of “one undivided Empire.” A question which I put on another occasion is now answered. Till this doctrine was thus clearly laid down, I was allowed to hope that “the great England over seas” at least took in that mighty company of free and independent commonwealths, speaking the English tongue, living under the English law, where, whether “in strenuous ease” or otherwise, our race has surely renewed its strength on the shores once planted by the Thirteen Colonies of England, and in the wider lands to the west of them. It is now at last plain that, in this new-fledged patriotism which can see national union only in “undivided Empire,” no place is found for the country of the man whose birth and deeds we this day remember. It is plain that “the great England beyond seas” is one in which Virginia and Massachusetts, Illinois and California, have no part or lot. Strange indeed to those earlier colonists, to the man of Hellas and to the man of Canaan, would the doctrine have sounded that there could be no national fellowship save among “peoples” of the same sovereign, that national brotherhood could take no shape but that of “undivided Empire.” “Empire” forsooth; there is something strange, nay something ominous, in the way in which that word and its even more threatening adjective seem ready to spring to every lip at every moment. The word sounds grand and vague; grand, it may be, because of its vagueness. To those who strive that every word they utter shall have a meaning, it calls up mighty and thrilling memories of a state of things which has passed away for ever. Its associations are far from being wholly evil. It calls up indeed pictures of the whole civilized world bowing down to one master at one centre. But it calls up thoughts of princes who bound the nations together by the tie of a just and equal law; it calls up thoughts of princes who gathered the nations round them to do the work of their day in that Eternal Question which needs no reopening because no diplomacy has ever closed it, the question between light and darkness, between West and East. But the thought of Empire is in all shapes the thought, not of brotherhood but of subjection; the word implies a master who commands and subjects who obey; “Imperium et Libertas” are names either of which forbids the presence of the other. The thought of “Empire,” alike in its noblest and its basest forms, may call up thoughts of nations severed in blood and speech, brought together, for good or evil, at the bidding of a common master; it cannot call up the higher thought of men of the same nation, scattered over distant lands, brought together, not at the bidding of a master,