“No,” resumed Leacraft, “that is true. It’s not the old home, and a big city--the greatest--cannot be boxed up in straw and packing cloth and get set up by order in another place, with the precision of a movable bungalow. But we need not trifle. We all know that it’s no child’s work. We expect something very different from London. We can meet the emergencies of place and room. Our population can be distributed. Remember, we are on trial, and the new, strange chapter opening before us will bring again into view the inalienable fortitude and power of the English mind. It’s a test. The conditions are irreversible, and mind and character will win--must win--or slowly, surely, the stars of our ascendancy pale and disappear. Nature for a moment has thrown us in a great peril, but was it nature or ourselves that won us footholds throughout the world? Open coasts await us, hundreds of thousands will welcome us. The influences of a common language, ancestry and institutions have chained together the links of our supremacy around the world, and made of it an inseparable girdle. Shall we falter now, when nature again challenges our mind to quell her hostility, opposing her impediments of sense to our invisible treasuries of thought, invention and self-confidence? It is a new step--our best step,--in the march of human liberty. We need to be divorced from the material constants, amid which the long fought battle for free thought and action has been waged. We are yet entangled in the meshes of tradition, the stumbling blocks of convention--and now they are shattered. We rise to splendid hopes. Or shall we say it is retribution, it is punishment for many sins. Let it be so. A chastened pride will not hurt us, nor will it hurt our chances.”