Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11
statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and
avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out of their
former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offence out
of their exoticism and hidden permanency, were to depreci-
ate their most radical proclivities, subvert their consciences,
make their minds narrow, and their tastes ‘national’—what!
a statesman who should do all this, which his people would
have to do penance for throughout their whole future, if
they had a future, such a statesman would be GREAT,
would he?’—‘Undoubtedly!’ replied the other old patriot ve-
hemently, ‘otherwise he COULD NOT have done it! It was
mad perhaps to wish such a thing! But perhaps everything
great has been just as mad at its commencement!’— ‘Misuse
of words!’ cried his interlocutor, contradictorily— ‘strong!
strong! Strong and mad! NOT great!’—The old men had ob-
viously become heated as they thus shouted their ‘truths’
in each other’s faces, but I, in my happiness and apartness,
considered how soon a stronger one may become master of
the strong, and also that there is a compensation for the
intellectual superficialising of a nation—namely, in the
deepening of another.
- Whether we call it ‘civilization,’ or ‘humanising,’ or
‘progress,’ which now distinguishes the European, whether
we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political
formula the DEMOCRATIC movement in Europe—be-
hind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by
such formulas, an immense PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESS
goes on, which is ever extending the process of the assimi-
