We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future, not as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble and alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every stone and doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the gift of our people. We look for the future growth of England not as the result of the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force, but because, as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we shall spread our freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is trampled, oppressed or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow up under our shelter to strength; we look for the spread of our language, not because it is of necessity the finest and most complex and expressive instrument of thought, though, after our instinct for freedom, it is the noblest outgrowth of our race, having perchance not the music of the Italian, the exact brilliance of the French, the ready power of expressing deep and powerful emotion of the German, or the multiple advantages of other forms of speech, yet, like some great and complex organ with understops and pipes which skilfully managed may produce almost any effect, being fitted to equal and perhaps surpass any language in its breadth of power,[81] but because in this tongue will be preached the most valuable lesson humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a people has come into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and advance. [81] How far does the passion of a workman for the tool he works with speak in us here? There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed. We look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look for the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression of the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an Englishman breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they pass away before him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to dominate and his claim to immortality. In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than there is to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be found in three hundred years' time in London or New York, as in Pekin or Yokohama. But what was great in him we believe will have encircled the globe; and English freedom will extend from Greenland to Borneo when the Englishman shall have melted into something larger.