But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it is a winning hazard. To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the Duke would now require to add every national, every village school, from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of Sidney and Wolfe. Has not the present war given a harvest of instances? The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of Abraham--"Have we won?" Another, his side raked by a hideous wound, dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me aside, men, and go on!" Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and summoned at great odds to surrender. "Never!" was the brief imperative response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot through the heart, he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks, this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the enfranchised masses. Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring, exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless! § 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark, disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom, that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic. Such manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.