As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces toward you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have. The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows on every soil. They may have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia; but until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.
This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly.... Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, ... your letters of office and your instructions and your suspending clauses are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your Government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even to the minutest member.
And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain themselves together! Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke's immortal scorn of such formalists:
"A sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. To men truly initiated and rightly taught, those ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."
England.
By JOHN E. DOLSON.
Birth land of statesmen, bards, heroes, and sages;
Mother of nations—the homes of the free;