Queen Victoria is undoubtedly indebted to the wise counsel and guidance of the Prince Consort in the early decades of her reign. Not one act of folly has marred its even current. She has held up to the nation a high ideal of wifehood, motherhood, and of domestic virtue. None of her predecessors have bound their people to them with ties so human, her griefs and experiences moving them as their own. We think of her more as an exalted type of Woman, than as Sovereign of the most marvellous Empire the World ever saw;—its area three times that of Europe, representing every zone, all products, and every race!
How long England will be capable of sending out a vital current sufficient to nourish such distant extremities none can tell; or whether the far-off Colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand will increase their independent life, until they become detached Sovereignties like the United States. If that day ever comes, like the Mother of a generation of grown children, with independent homes of their own,—England will sit with folded hands, her life-work done.
Let no American forget, that England before the Restoration is as much
our England as theirs. That the memories of Crecy, of Blenheim, of
Marston Moor and Naseby, are our great inheritance too. That Chaucer,
Milton, Shakespeare, belong to the humblest American as much as to
Victoria.
The branch has grown far from the parent tree since the 17th Century; and the England of Tennyson and Herbert Spencer is only a very distant cousin. She has not always treated us well, has not been chary of criticism, nor prodigal of praise, nor did she sympathize with us in the day of our peril and misfortune. But for all that—sharing the same great heritage of race and of literature, speaking in the same language the same thoughts and impulses, there must always exist between us a tie, such as can bind us to no other nation upon the earth.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Evolution of an Empire, by Mary Parmele