is in truth, with many faults, a certain μεσότης about the English character—in spite of their insularity, a certain Shakespearean breadth about the English people which has peculiarly fitted them for the part they have had to play in Europe in the past, and peculiarly fits them for its continuance under the different conditions of the future. The very things that, up to a certain point, contributed to their insularity, the comparatively isolated course of English history, the national love of the via media in politics and religion, the recoil from either of the rival fanaticisms into which our continental neighbours have so often fallen—all these things, corrected by the cosmopolitanism which the growth of a vast Empire has brought with it, have helped to make the English people what they are, in a sense, to-day—the central people of the world. Whether it is owing to the composite character of the English stock itself, or to the political circumstances that have combined English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh in one national State without entirely fusing them, we seem to have escaped a certain rigidity of political temper and a certain liability to excesses of national Chauvinism, by which more sharply defined nationalities are sometimes afflicted. Even our near kindred, the Americans, are not wholly free from these limitations, and to that extent they have ceased to be the true heirs and upholders of the Shakespearean tradition.
England has been far more successful, however, in communicating her special qualities to the younger nations that still move with her in the same political orbit; and by projecting these qualities into her Empire as a whole she has given it a special fitness for carrying on her own high tradition and fulfilling in a larger sense and on a grander scale the regulating mission she bequeaths to it. Wide and various as the world itself, the British Empire is not likely to employ its collective energies for any merely partial or selfish object. Constituted as it is, or as in any future developments it is likely to be.
