Great Britain

“ And the standing of Great Britain as a world power lay not alone in her vast colonial dominion and her earth-wide wars, but also in the extraordinary enterprise that carried her ships to all seas, and made her the commercial emporium of the world. Not only to her own colonies, but to all lands, sailed her enormous fleet of merchantmen, gathering the products of the earth, to be consumed at home or distributed again to the nations of Europe and America. She had assumed the position of the purveyor and carrier for mankind. ”

“ Of the Great Powers which between them control the destinies of civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and the most various. If the State is a "cauldron" for mingling "the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity" of the portions of mankind—or if, to use an apter metaphor, it is a body whose perfection consists in the very variety of the functions of its several members—there has never been on the earth a political organism like the British Empire. ”

“ I have not sought to persuade him that Great Britain is a charitable institution. What nation is, or could be, given the nature of man? Her good treatment of us has been to her own interest. She is wise, farseeing, less of an opportunist in her statesmanship than any other nation. She has seen clearly and ever more clearly that our good will was to her advantage. And beneath her wisdom, at the bottom of all, is her sense of our kinship through liberty defined and assured by law. ”

“ What suits Great Britain, with her insular position and consequent need to concentrate and intensify her life, her limited monarchy, and spirit of trade, does not suit a mixed race, continually enriched with new blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our first descent, with ample field and verge enough to range in and leave every impulse free, and abundant opportunity to develope a genius, wide and full as our rivers, flowery, luxuriant and impassioned as our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed. ”

“ The gentleman, in fact, forgets that Britain is indebted to her navy, not for her commerce only, but for her independence; not only for the dominion of the seas, but for her existence as a nation. Every man, who is in the smallest degree versed in history, knows that Great Britain, but for her navy, must long since have been a province of France. ”

“ In determining his merits as director of the foreign policy of Great Britain, I have stood, I confess, by the old doctrines, and argued upon the assumption that England is a great state, disposed to maintain that greatness; that the English people is a proud, generous, and brave people, prepared to assert its principles and its position, and to assume its part in the affairs of the world—a nation that takes its share in the general policy of nations—that feels it has a common interest in the maintenance of justice, in the limitation of unscrupulous ambition, in the progress of civilization. ”

“ France may furnish us with looking-glasses, but without the aid of Britain we shall be ashamed to see ourselves in them; unless the sans culottes can persuade us that threadbare beggary is—a beauty. France may deck the heads of our wives and daughters (by the bye, she shan’t those of mine) with ribbons, gauze, and powder; their ears with bobs, their cheeks with paint, and their heels with gaudy parti-coloured silk, as rotten as the hearts of the manufacturers; but Great Britain must keep warm their limbs and cover their bodies. ”

“ With some sad exceptions, I think that Great Britain has reason to be proud of her aristocracy. I do not speak now of those gaudy flaunting personages, of either sex, who, by their excesses or eccentricities, are eternally obtruding themselves, their manners, dress, and equipage, upon the offended ear and eye of the public; but of those who occupy their exalted sphere in simplicity, in calmness, and in unobtrusive dignity and virtue. I am no flatterer or idolater of the nobility. ”

“ But Great Britain alone has the means of this influence to an extent dangerous to the United States. It has been said that Great Britain was fighting the battles of the world—that she stands against universal dominion threatened by the arch-fiend of mankind. I should be sorry if our independence depended upon the power of Great Britain. If, however, she would act the part of a friendly power towards the United States, I should never wish to deprive her of power, of wealth, of honor, of prosperity. ”

“ Great Britain will undoubtedly be led to espouse her true Interest; her Commerce will be extended and established; and we shall become a more flourishing, united, powerful People, than we are, even at present ”

“ Great Britain, freed from the connection, can well afford to repose in peaceful majesty on her own shores, improving the arts, extending her commerce, and communicating, as the most noble and renowned nation the blessings of religion to the remotest parts of the globe. ”

“ A Continent, whose inhabitants double every five-and-twenty years! who, therefore, within a century and an half will be upwards of an hundred and twenty millions of souls! Forbid it, Patriotism, forbid it, Politics, that such a great and mighty Empire as this should be held in subjection by the paltry Kingdom of Great Britain! Rather let the seat of empire be transferred; and let it be fixed where it ought to be, namely, in Great America! ”

“ During the first twenty years of the nineteenth century Great Britain, though possessing the most liberal constitution of any of the powers, was the consistent ally of the absolute monarchies of Europe. ”

“ Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on the British flag. ”

“ Great Britain was the one great Power. She alone had colonies and India. She as good as monopolised the world's shipping and the world's trade. As compared with other countries she was immeasurably rich and prosperous. Her population during the long peace, interrupted only by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, had multiplied beyond men's wildest dreams. Her manufacturers were amassing fortunes, her industry had no rival. The Victorian age was thought of as the beginning of a wonderful new era, in which, among the nations, England was first and the rest nowhere. ”

“ Our young republic had barely established her independence, and shaken off the lingering grasp of Great Britain from the forts and towns bordering on the Great Lakes,—had only just begun to feel the young giant's blood in her veins, and to trust her own strength when measured with that of an older and adroit foe,—when the nineteenth century dawned, in which so much has already been accomplished, though its ninth decade is but just completed. ”

“ Great Britain, with her frightful debt, her terrible taxation, her dissatisfied, restless, beggared myriads of the lower working classes, her remorseless aristocracy, her bloated spirit of caste, her enforced but heartless religion, has hung a more terrible avalanche over her head than ever leaped down the heights of the Tyrol.
Such are examples of success or failure in attempts at government, among the proudest and most prosperous nations of the Old World, in modern and what are called enlightened times. If seventy years be the life of a man, what should be the life of a nation? ”

“ Hundreds of years ago, in the ancient boroughs of England, a genius for self-government began to display itself, and it is that to which the greatness of our empire is mainly to be attributed. We not only got the noblest of all Imperial gifts—self-government—but we got more than that. Great Britain gave us another noble Imperial gift—the magnificent continent we possess, with all its resources and all its wealth. ”

“ The working out of the idea of democracy in a country like England which still retained its monarchical form and much of its aristocratic flavor, was a theme on which he dwelt with particular pleasure. Back somewhere in the line of descent his paternal ancestors had been of English blood, and he was proud of the heroism, the spirit and the energy which had made Great Britain one of the mighty nations of the earth. ”

“ The history of Great Britain is the one with which we are in general the best acquainted, and it gives us many useful lessons. We may profit by their experience, without paying the price which it cost them. ”

“ Britons of average powers of observation, with an intelligent knowledge of their own country and a sufficient one of others, know very well that Great Britain, whether in its wilder or its tamer aspects, resembles no other country in the least little bit, but is absolutely unique in almost every detail, natural and artificial, that goes to make a landscape. ”

“ What has prevented the realisation of so glorious a vision? what has stepped between Great Britain and the diadem encircling the earth thus presented to her grasp, and converted an empire which might now have daily, and for centuries to come, been growing in strength, overflowing with prosperity, unanimous in loyalty, into one declining in numbers, shivered in power, divided in opinion? ”

“ Not less interesting to us has been the marvellous growth of Britain’s empire in the last hundred years. Her colonies and possessions are found on every continent, and her flag floats on every sea. She is still “Mistress of the Sea,” and her navy carries British goods and manufactures to every land. Her commerce is great beyond comparison, and her language and civilization are finding a sure foothold in every nation. But better than all, England’s influence for truth, justice, and righteousness, is greater than ever. ”

“ But for one fatal stain upon our institutions,—a stain of which we were constantly reminded, as the one thing that shamed all our pretensions,—it seemed as if the peaceful and prosperous development of the great nation sprung from the loins of England were accepted as a gain to universal civilization. In the fulness of time the heir of Great Britain's world-shadowing empire came among us to receive the wide and cordial welcome which we could afford to give without compromising our republicanism, and he to receive without lessening his dignity. ”

“ Though, by a just turn-about of things here below, Great Britain has become a colony of the United States, the English are not yet reconciled to the situation. ”

“ Resolved,⁠That these ^united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved
NH.—— ”

“ What, too, if that same security and prosperity tempts us—as foreigners justly complain of us—to set our hearts on material wealth; to believe that our life, and the life of Britain, depends on the abundance of the things which she possesses? To say—Corn and cattle, coal and iron, house and land, shipping and rail-roads, these make up Great Britain. ”

“ Surely, I have yet to learn that Great Britain has dreamt, and is dreaming, to impose by Force her "mentality," her language, her political institutions to China, to Japan, to Russia, to France, to all the South American Republics, to Italy, to Spain, to Germany, to Austria-Hungary, to Turkey, &c., which, considered as a whole, represent, any one must admit, a pretty large part of the universe. ”

“ The conception of the Nation is the clue to the solution of all the problems with which the people of Great Britain are confronted. They are those of foreign and imperial policy, of defence national and imperial, of education and of social life.
Foreign and imperial policy include all affairs external to Great Britain, the relations of Great Britain to Europe, to India, to the Colonies, and to the Powers of Asia and America. In all these external affairs the question to be asked is, what is Britain's duty? ”

“ The commercial and political concerns and interests connected with these vast portions of the globe, are well known to be immense, and of the first-rate importance, while no European power is so much interested in these as Great Britain. ”

“ The heart of the British Empire is to be found in Great Britain. It is not proposed in this place to deal either with the working of British political institutions, or with the various important social and economic problems which the actual condition of England presents, but only with the extremities of the body politic, and more especially with those where the inhabitants of the countries under British rule are not of Anglo-Saxon origin. ”

“ Thus was a small shoot of an Empire unsurpassed for the freedom of its subjects well and truly planted in the western shore of the vast possessions of Great Britain, this side of the provinces in the East, and now did the people, rejoicing in their freedom, begin to look for expansion and progress. ”

“ Every day of my sojourn in this country deepens the desire in my mind to see an increasing unity of understanding between America and England. I feel that the audacity of America, its passion for the Right Thing, and its impatience with the spirit of muddling through are the finest incentives for modern England, England at this dawn of her political renascence. I feel, too, as Americans themselves most willingly acknowledge, that Great Britain has something to give to America out of the ancient treasury of her domestic experience. ”