"The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps eventually to overspread. "In America the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found plantations of her own--that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world. "Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled 'Great,' America, Australia, India, must form a 'Greater Britain.'" He wrote of this passage in his Memoir: 'The preface of _Greater Britain_, in which the title is justified and explained, is the best piece of work of my life. It states the doctrine on which our rule should be based--remembered in Canada-- forgotten in South Africa--the true as against the bastard Imperialism. As will be seen from it, I included in my "Greater Britain" our Magna Graecia of the United States. As late as 1880, twelve years after the publication of my book, not only was the title "Greater Britain" often used for the English world--as I used it--but, speaking at the Lotus Club of New York, Mr. Whitelaw Reid used it specially of the United States. Tom Hughes, he declared, "led a pioneer English colony to this Greater Britain, to seek here a fuller expansion." It is contracting an idea which, as its author, I think lofty and even noble, to use "Greater Britain" only of the British Empire, as is now done.' The touch of enthusiasm in this book lifted his writing to its highest plane. He himself was specially proud of the praise which P. G. Hamerton bestowed on the landscape passages: [Footnote: See Appendix, pp. 72, 73.] and they have the quality, which his grandfather schooled him in, of being really descriptive. But his characteristic excellence is found far more in such a passage as that which follows his sketch of the time when "the thinking men of Boston and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more ... morally seceded from their country's councils," because in those councils the slave-holders still had the upper hand. Here are a few of its ringing sentences: