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While, if one turns one's eyes to the great northland in whose people Europe and Asia mingle, and studies their strangely virile and intense literature and their characters, in which the lion and the lamb are so strangely blended, and men willing to die rather than exercise any form of force towards their fellows are found side by side with those who know of no governing power but the knout; when one watches this great, strange, strong, gentle, fierce folk, so yet unexhausted, one is strangely drawn towards it and compelled to recognize that the Russian is not merely physically but intellectually one of the mighty modifying forces of the future.

So, if one crosses the sea to the little island of fogs and mists, it may be forgiven to one who has its people's blood in his veins, if, having well studied its people in their past and their present, their heights and their depths, he should say, as the Jew has a right to say of his nation—"If we are the worst of humanity, we are also of its best!" For, like the Jew, if we English have sordid racial vices we have magnificent virtues; and we resemble him in this, that those very vices which most mark our national character and by which we are known throughout the earth, are the very qualities of which our greatest men and our noblest elements are the negation. As the Jew, marked everywhere by his devotion to material gain and the thirst for wealth, has yet, in his loftiest men of genius, realized the height of spirituality and the negation of all subjection to the sensuous; so we—the English folk, known throughout the world for our greed of power and pelf, and as tending always to cloak our self-seeking from our own eyes and from that of the world with a mantle of assumed virtue: a tendency which has made the name of England synonymous with hypocrisy and perfidy throughout the world—yet possess, in our greatest men and our ethically developed class, a body of individuals whose lives and ideals are a superb opposition to these qualities. Beside the sordid gold-seeker, financial speculator, land grabber and buccaneer, stand our Shelley and our Milton; beside the millions who use philanthropy as a means of self-gratification and a cloak to greed and ambition, are thousands with whom it is a heroic reality. Without any national prejudice may one not say that no people in the world ever possessed a section more determined to see things nakedly as they are, and, whether personally or nationally, to prefer justice to self-interest, than a section of our English people? Have there ever been statesmen in any land who have more fearlessly denounced injustice and oppression, not merely when exercised towards their own nation but by it, than Burke and Chatham when they raised their voices to oppose George the Third supported by the bulk of the English nation in their attempt to crush freedom in America? If no nation has more misrepresented, neglected and persecuted its sons of light, no nation has had more of them to persecute. If Dante's dream were a reality, mayhap we should find in that lowest hell, among the sad multitudes walking round continually with iron weights upon their heads, that every third man was an Englishman; but we should also scale to no heaven so high that in the highest circle among the brightest spirits we should not find the sons and daughters of the damp little isle. If ten righteous would have saved a city once, shall not a nation be saved by ten millions? Shall it not be counted for righteousness to our stock-jobbers and priests and politicians, who, tongue buried in cheek, talk of spreading Christianity and enlightenment, when he means exploitation and destruction, that he belongs to a race thousands of whose men and women do sincerely desire those things which he affects? When the great Jew raised over his native city his mighty cry of—"O Jerusalem"—was it not proved by that very cry itself that sons of light were born even in her degenerate bosom? Was it not something that she gave birth to the prophets whom she killed and stoned?