conquered, so from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden; but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him, "companions," comites indeed, in that title's original meaning. But the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII, recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery, and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united. The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of nationality, cement the union.

In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year. The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny. Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in the recorded annals of man.

Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.

In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering. England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century. How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in the choral ode of the Oedipus, delineates, "the laws of sublimer range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."

§ 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT

The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul, exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of Thermopylae, the +enérgeia tês psychês+—the energy of the soul. This energy of the soul in Aristotle is the vertù of Machiavelli, the spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State. It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer daring.

In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas. Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.

Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes. His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history, composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age, is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and to the west of the