CHAPTER XLVIII.
The Re-Settling of the Waters.
The convulsion, looking to all its effects, had been a violent one, and the old order was shattered beyond recovery; yet the British Revolution of 189— was working for the good of the nation and of the world better than any national triumph could have done; thus verifying what Victor Hugo had written half a century before, ‘Les nations sont grandes, Dieu merci! en dehors de la bonne ou mauvaise fortune d'un capitaine.’ The dissolution of the old pattern of empire purchased cheaply the new domain of social improvement; and, after all, when we ask what sort of greatness the country had lost, the answer comes that it was only a discredited sort,—one which the awakening public conscience was beginning to look askance at. There was a prospect now that nations might at last learn to trust one another, not because human nature was radically altered, but because it was against the interest of each to be out of touch with the general sentiment of the others. Public opinion, which formerly belonged to cliques, subsequently to the mass of the people, was now becoming international. And all this because the British Revolution had broken the cast-iron shell and let a ray of the truth illumine the darkness and purify the bad air within.
It might indeed be said in biblical metaphor that this time, at any rate, the ten righteous had been found in Sodom. However misdealing might prevail in high places commonly supposed to be temples of integrity; however covertly venal justice had become; however hypocritical morality had remained; though the State might be rotten almost to the core—yet the actual core was sound: its soundness was evinced by one thing which sufficed. Behind clouds of iniquity, England had a great light to show,—that she had done more, take it altogether, than any other country hitherto, to raise her womankind, or allow it to rise, out of the mire of prehistoric servitude; and it was from this cause alone that the Battle of Queenstown had opened to her the noblest of missions, instead of placing her, as it otherwise must have done, on the list of great empires blotted out.
For it may well be doubted whether the decline and fall of any one of the great empires of history came about, or could have come about, apart from the paralysing action of internal foes; it is rather the division of the house against itself than assault from outside, which is the secret of its fate. A State may be strong even though split up into parties, provided that those parties acknowledge some rallying-cry to which they will sink their differences from the common defence. But if there be one party among them imbued with such implacable resentment against the State itself as not only to be deaf to the call, but actually to welcome the common danger—then assuredly the mischief which that one can work will overbalance the good done by the patriotism of the rest.
And had the great naval and military disaster befallen a people influenced—for the influence of women is ubiquitous, we had almost said omnipotent—by such a generation: as that to which our heroine’s nearest relatives and some other females in this story belonged, the impulses of revenge and hatred, bred by mortification, would have prevailed in the national councils, and would have made an enemy deadly and permanent—permanent until such time as the question were set at rest for ever by some catastrophe nearer home and more fatal than Queenstown. But the rising generation among whose pioneers Lesbia Newman was one, cared for no imperialism which did not benefit the races ruled; the influence of her and her like was for peace and progress, without regard to defeats or triumphs of arms belonging to the woeful past. And the nation, fitted by the trials of Revolution to imbibe the better spirit thus engendered, soon found that the source of apprehended ruin had, on the contrary, become a source of strength, the resort and the home of sound, if retrospective, patriotism and more genuine conservative instincts than during that turbulent period when it was formerly a portion of dominions on which the sun, notwithstanding the catastrophe, had not even now begun to set.
Besides, over the head of territorial questions and dynastic disputes, a feeling was gaining ascendancy, that the old-fashioned patriotism, as meaning the love of one’s country at the expense of other countries, is not so very exalted a virtue after all; that the sympathies of modern man should be cosmopolitan. For if the worship of womanhood in its apotheosis was to supersede that of the old gods, be they one, three, or more, how could any portion of the apotheosis be antagonistic to another portion? And if not, where would be room for that rivalry between nations which the old idea of patriotism implied? Before the establishment of this common bond, there had been no more fertile source of strife than religous belief; but if all creeds were to be practically fused into one, international hostility could never more take any but the most sordid ground. So the less said about patriotism in future the better. Nobler aims and higher ideals were now coming to the front; and as the day-spring from on high grew apace, the evil phantasms of the past fled before it, and with them vanished those standards of honour which superstitious stupidity had set up. One human family bound together by fact not fancy, one demonstrable religion, one moral code, following nature instead of the craft of augurs and the tyranny of despots—such was the platform to which the new society should climb, throwing aside its childish things.
Dona nobis pacem. Already a great calm was broadening down over the world, because the abomination of desolation, the usurper of divine attributes and honours, the false god and true devil, the grim, huge, hideous, overshadowing, bearded idol of a thousand centuries or more, tottered to its fall; and the ineradicable religious instinct of mankind was turning from that nightmare to shelter under the wings of Eternal Wisdom, whose worship, now about to be inaugurated by the recognition of Her image and representative, caused the sunshine of peace beyond understanding to be felt from the spiritual to the temporal sphere, from innermost to outermost of the rind of human nature we call civilisation.