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
