In the Parliament House at Westminster, among the scenes from English history painted on the walls, the American is most stirred when he comes to the Departure of the Pilgrim Fathers to found New England. England--the England descended from the England which "harried them out"--will not let that scene go as a part of American history only, but claims it now as one of the proudest scenes in her own history, too. So the American will no more view Wyclif and Shakespeare and Cromwell and Milton and Gladstone as chiefly Englishmen, but as fellow-citizens,--as he views Victor Hugo and Kant and Tolstoi and Mazzini. The American is to be pitied who does not feel himself native to Stratford and to London, as to St. Louis or St. Paul,--native to Leyden and to Weimar and Geneva. Each narrower circle only gains in richness and in sacredness and power as it expands into the larger; each community and state and nation, as it enters into a broader and completer organic life. This is the divine message to the world. Let there be peace; let there be order; and, that there may be, let us know what manner of men we are. "Peace on earth!"--that was the first Christmas greeting; and the first Christian argument upon the hill of Mars,--"God hath made of one blood all nations of men." FOOTNOTE: [51] By permission of the author. THE PERMANENCY OF EMPIRE[52] WENDELL PHILLIPS I appeal to History! Tell me, thou reverend chronicler of the grave, can all the wealth of a universal commerce, can all the achievements of this world's wisdom, secure to empire the permanency of its possessions? Alas! Troy thought so once; yet the land of Priam lives only in song! Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate. So thought Palmyra--where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman. In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality; and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps. The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island that was then a speck, rude and neglected in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may not, one day, be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was! Who shall say, that, when the European column shall have moldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant! FOOTNOTE: [52] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.