The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach undaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism which finds such moving expression in the pæan of Shakespeare:
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
. . . . . . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
. . . . . . .
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.
This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon developed an assurance of special protection-"the favour of the love of Heaven," wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica," "we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us"-was tempered by that humility still to be seen in the liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might of the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethan translators of the Bible called "Our Sion," and whose mission, according to Milton, had been to sound forth "the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe," had sunk to the swaggering militarism that found expression in "Rule, Britannia."
When Britain first at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.
The nations not so blest as thee
Must in their turn to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish, great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
To thee belongs the rural reign,
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles, thine.
It is the true expression of its period-a period which Sir John Seeley in his "Expansion of England" characterizes as the period of the struggle with France for the possession of India and the New World: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had replaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritime States of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley sums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Well may Mr. Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old Testament sense of being "answered in stormy oracles of air and sea" lowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the sea serving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the high-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the East India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is founded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It helps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in the atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in 1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the Bible.
In Cromwell, that typical Englishman, these two strands of impulse are seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seized Jamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not Catholic Spain the enemy of God? Delenda est Carthago is his feeling towards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. "The Lord by his Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the opportunity to draw off those horse." Yet this elect of God ruthlessly massacres surrendered Irish garrisons. "Sir," he writes with almost childish naïveté, "God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon shot." We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite. Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously like Bismarck's that his deceased hero
The soldier taught that inward mail to wear
And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?
The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with the universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous tendency.
At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of "Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob celebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is not wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule, Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the grosser Hebrew prophecies:
I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:
All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,
Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,
he points to the virgin shores "beyond the vast Atlantic surge" and cries:
This new world,
Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:
And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow
The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.
Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,
Awe with your navies every hostile land.
Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:
They rule the balanced world who rule the main.
But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written expressly to persuade the England of 1883 not to give up India and the Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truer soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions of the Hebrew bards.
The Lord our God Most High,
He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is characteristically practical.
Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience;
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own,
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.
And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernède, yet even he writes:-