I am, of course, full of respect and admiration for the great people whose power and prodigious deeds are witnessed in every corner of the world by their victories, their industry, and their commerce. I do not, however, feel that I am bound to respect and admire no other. It seems to me a confession altogether too cruel and humiliating to mankind, to say that, since the beginning of the ages, it has only succeeded in producing the full flower of civilization on a little island in the western ocean, and that even there the true principle was not discovered before the reign of William and Mary. Such a conception seems, you must allow, a little narrow. And then consider its danger. If civilization depends on a particular form of government, then reason, observation, and science will soon have no voice in the question at all; party-feeling alone will decide. Some bold spirits will be found to follow their own preferences, and refuse to the British institutions the honour of being the ideal of human perfection; all their enthusiasm will be given to the system established at Petrograd or Vienna. Many people, perhaps the majority of those living between the Rhine and the Pyrenees, will hold that, in spite of some defects, France is still the most civilized country in the world. The moment that a decision as to culture becomes a matter of personal feeling, agreement is impossible. The most highly developed man will be he who holds the same views as oneself as to the respective duties of ruler and subjects; while the unfortunate people who happen to think differently will be barbarians and savages. No one, I suppose, will question the logic of this, or dispute that a system that can lead to such a conclusion is, to say the least of it, very incomplete. For my own part, Guizot’s definition seems to me inferior even to that given by William von Humboldt: “Civilization is the humanizing of peoples both in their outward customs and institutions, and in the inward feelings that correspond to these.”[38]