The lower element in the English nation has chosen, and by that choice she and we must now abide.
Out of the whitened bones of the English soldiers who have fallen bravely fighting in South Africa fate is rearing up a great cairn, beneath which lie buried for ever the noblest possibilities of the English people.
The regeneration of nations, as of individuals, is possible, and for the English people there may still be a great and noble future, a future which shall produce in the little Island of the North men worthy to be successors to the noblest of her sons of the past. She may still walk in the path of freedom and humanity, though she can no more lead; but it can only be when, after mighty and agonizing social upheavals, she has reorganized her own social structure.
What ails the race to-day in the little Island of the North is that there has been an irruption of the lower and more sordid elements in her body politic over its entire surface, where they have formed as it were an upper crust: as over some green land there might be a physical eruption of scoriæ and sulphurous lava forming a crust over what had been once green fields and fruitful plains. Never, till the healthier strata within the nation have arisen and cracked up and thrown off the plutocratic crust which has caked over its national existence, will vigour and health be restored to it.
The future may have a great task in store for that little Island of the North we once loved so and towards which our hearts still call; she may yet lead the world by showing how a community may so reorganize and reshape itself that it may pass from death to life. But she will now have to move along her own path; we on ours—till, it may be, across the ages, we meet again, in the free confederacy of all the world's peoples.
A terrible and irrevocable "Might have been" has been written by fate over the possibilities of England in South Africa.
The little vessel of the North Sea may still be sound, but, while her sails are manned and her rudder guided as they are to-day, she drifts towards the rocks. It may be that after the shock she will recover herself and re-man her vessel: for
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again!
It may be that her flag washed from its stain will be no more a "Commercial Asset," and that it may yet float free in the air, the banner of freedom, peace and justice of our dreams—