On Compromise | Page 4

John Moody
or another's, is England befriending to-day? To say that no great
cause is left, is to tell us that we have reached the final stage of human progress, and
turned over the last leaf in the volume of human improvements. The day when this is said
and believed marks the end of a nation's life. Is it possible that, after all, our old
protestant spirit, with its rationality, its austerity, its steady political energy, has been
struck with something of the mortal fatigue that seizes catholic societies after their fits of
revolution?
We need not forget either the atrocities or the imbecilities which mark the course of
modern politics on the Continent. I am as keenly alive as any one to the levity of France,
and the [Greek: hubris] of Germany. It may be true that the ordinary Frenchman is in
some respects the victim of as poor an egoism as that of the ordinary Englishman; and
that the American has no advantage over us in certain kinds of magnanimous sentiment.
What is important is the mind and attitude, not of the ordinary man, but of those who
should be extraordinary. The decisive sign of the elevation of a nation's life is to be
sought among those who lead or ought to lead. The test of the health of a people is to be
found in the utterances of those who are its spokesmen, and in the action of those whom
it accepts or chooses to be its chiefs. We have to look to the magnitude of the issues and
the height of the interests which engage its foremost spirits. What are the best men in a
country striving for? And is the struggle pursued intrepidly and with a sense of its size
and amplitude, or with creeping foot and blinking eye? The answer to these questions is
the answer to the other question, whether the best men in the country are small or great. It
is a commonplace that the manner of doing things is often as important as the things done.

And it has been pointed out more than once that England's most creditable national action
constantly shows itself so poor and mean in expression that the rest of Europe can discern
nothing in it but craft and sinister interest. Our public opinion is often rich in wisdom, but
we lack the courage of our wisdom. We execute noble achievements, and then are best
pleased to find shabby reasons for them.
There is a certain quality attaching alike to thought and expression and action, for which
we may borrow the name of grandeur. It has been noticed, for instance, that Bacon strikes
and impresses us, not merely by the substantial merit of what he achieved, but still more
by a certain greatness of scheme and conception. This quality is not a mere idle
decoration. It is not a theatrical artifice of mask or buskin, to impose upon us unreal
impressions of height and dignity. The added greatness is real. Height of aim and nobility
of expression are true forces. They grow to be an obligation upon us. A lofty sense of
personal worth is one of the surest elements of greatness. That the lion should love to
masquerade in the ass's skin is not modesty and reserve, but imbecility and degradation.
And that England should wrap herself in the robe of small causes and mean reasons is the
more deplorable, because there is no nation in the world the substantial elements of
whose power are so majestic and imperial as our own. Our language is the most widely
spoken of all tongues, its literature is second to none in variety and power. Our people,
whether English or American, have long ago superseded the barbarous device of dictator
and Caesar by the manly arts of self-government. We understand that peace and industry
are the two most indispensable conditions of modern civilisation, and we draw the lines
of our policy in accordance with such a conviction. We have had imposed upon us by the
unlucky prowess of our ancestors the task of ruling a vast number of millions of alien
dependents. We undertake it with a disinterestedness, and execute it with a skill of
administration, to which history supplies no parallel, and which, even if time should show
that the conditions of the problem were insoluble, will still remain for ever admirable. All
these are elements of true pre-eminence. They are calculated to inspire us with the loftiest
consciousness of national life. They ought to clothe our voice with authority, to nerve our
action by generous resolution, and to fill our counsels with weightiness and power.
Within the last forty years England has lost one by one each of those enthusiasms which
may have been illusions,--some of them undoubtedly were so,--but
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