sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but not consciously, not deliberately. In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2] The ideal makes great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson, Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which, after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility. Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift. § 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM