ULEST WE FORGET!" 255

and New Zealand members of one body with us," Froude \?rote,
"we might sit secure against shifts and changes." Without
them a little overcrowded island would not be able to support
its people or assure them the kind of life that made free men.
Already in her squalid mushroom cities multitudes were growing
up pale and stunted or were leaving her shores in despair. For
lack of an imperial policy four-fifths of those who emigrated
went to the United States, frequently in association with British
capital invested there. Other nations-—Russia, Germany and
United States—were seeking new territories to provide for their
people's future. England alone, in her materialist absorption
with the present, seemed indifferent to hers.

Yet in her splendid past she had unconsciously made provision
for it, "in the fairest spots upon the globe where there was still
soil and sunshine; where the race might for ages renew its mighty
youth, bring forth as many millions as it would and still have
means to breed and rear them strong as the best which she pro-
duced in her early prime. The colonists might be paying no
revenue but they were opening up the face of the earth. By and
by, like the spreading branches of a forest tree, they would return
the sap which they were gathering into the heart. England could
pour out among them, in return, year after year, those poor
children of hers now choking in fetid alleys, and, relieved of
the strain, breathe again fresh air into her own smoke-encrusted
lungs. With her colonies part of herself, she would be, as
Harrington had foreshadowed, a commonwealth resting on the
mightiest foundations which the world had ever seen. Queen
among the nations, from without invulnerable, and at peace and
at health within—this was the alternative future before Oceana."1

Froude was an old man with his historian's heart rooted in
the past. He was no friend to democracy: he feared its destructive
influences. But he ended his book with an appeal to the masses
with whom future power lay tp be wiser than the calico and hard-
ware merchants they were supplanting. The other great Anglo-
Saxon democracy sooner than forfeit its future had shed the
blood of half a million of its sons to preserve the union. The
continuance of a commonwealth of freemen was worth some
sacrifice.

That was in 1886. Four years later came the biggest literary
sensation since the appearance of Pickwick. A young man of