English principle of local self-government been developed with such success?" 1

1 Contemporary Review, 34, p. 678, etc., art. "Self-Government in Towns," by J. Allanson Picton. For a hopeful view of the prospects of the United States, and also of Canada and Australia, as regards the disappearance of political corruption, see Dilke: Problems of Greater Britain, p. 103.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE FUTURE OF ANGLO-SAXON FREEDOM.

THE progress of Anglo-Saxon freedom has been outlined in these pages through eighteen hundred years, from the Germans of Tacitus to the present moment. It is now in place to consider what may fairly be anticipated for it in years to come, and to inquire whether the generation of English-speaking men now upon the stage is doing what may reasonably be expected of it, in view of the opportunities it enjoys and the responsibilities with which it is trusted. Though Anglo-Saxon freedom in a more or less partial form has been adopted (it would be better perhaps to say imitated) by every nation in Europe, but Russia, and in Asia by Japan, the hopes for that freedom, in the future, rest with the Englishspeaking race. By that race alone it has been preserved amidst a thousand perils; to that race alone is it thoroughly congenial; if we can conceive the possibility of the disappearance among peoples of that race, the chance would be small for that freedom's survival. They are the Levites to whom, in especial, is committed the guardianship of this ark, so infinitely precious to the world. In no century of its career has the band understood so well the sacred character of its responsibility, and looked with such love upon the trust it was appointed to defend.

Predictions of

spread of the

Englishspeaking race.

One of the latest and best of historians believes it. possible that the two branches of English-speaking men will always remain separate political existences, that the older, indeed, may the wide sometime again break into two or more nations. He predicts, however, that all will become one in spirit, and before fifty years have passed, change the face of the world. Two hundred million of English-speaking men he beholds with prophetic glance in the valley of the Mississippi, fifty million in Australia, and a growth commensurate in the other vast regions which our far-roaming brethren have possessed. Before this enormous increase, other peoples are destined to sink into the second rank. The inevitable issue is to be that the primacy of the world will lie with us. English institutions, English speech, English thought, are to become the main features of the political, social, and intellectual life of mankind.1

A pamphlet widely circulated during the past decade contemplates the future of the English-speaking race and their institutions with still more enthusiasm.2 In a hundred years, says Mr. Zincke, the United States will have a population of 800,000,000; Canada, 64,000,000; Australia, 48,000,000; South Africa, 16,000,000; Great Britain and Ireland, 70,000,000: altogether, in his estimate, there will be 1,000,000,000, substantially the same in language, institutions and ideals. The United States will have overflowed southward and into the islands of the

1 J. R. Green: History of the English People, IV, p. 270, etc.

2 By Rev. F. Barham Zincke, Chaplain to the Queen; reviewed in New York "Nation," April 5, 1883.

Pacific. Our limits will touch those of Australia and New Zealand, which on their side, too, will flow out. In South Africa, also, the "Englishry" will have wonderfully multiplied and poured into the regions lying northward, which Livingstone and Stanley have laid open and are proving to be habitable. The flower of the species, therefore, says the writer, who has no mean idea of our stock, will have come, in the course of a century, to occupy the fairest parts of the planet. What will be the nature of the society which one hundred years from now will be thus widespread ? It will be fundamentally the same in manners and ideas, with slight differences due to climate and soil. Mr. Zincke has made himself well-known in England by his strenuous opposition to "landlordism," and his able advocacy of "peasant proprietorship." The immense estates, consisting of many thousands of acres, sometimes almost of whole counties, which exist in England, Scotland, and Ireland, where the owners are often absentees, scarcely seeing their lands from one year's end to another, and where the occupants are merely tenants, at the will of the landlord as regards rent, and liable to ejection at any time if he should see fit to turn his pasture into a game preserve, or prefer to have a great tract occupied by farms changed into a lordly park, these immense estates, our writer regards as producing immense evil for the population. Let them be broken up into small holdings, upon each one of which shall live, as in days of yore, the yeoman, independent in spirit, because he feels that he owns the land he tills; patriotic, for he has a stake in the country that bore him; intelligent and energetic,

because in the exercise of the thousand rights and responsibilities which belong to a condition of free proprietorship, the mind becomes in every way stimulated and trained. Let us have back again, urges Mr. Zincke, our old English yeoman; or, as he does not hesitate to say, let us have the American farmer, which is the same thing. He feels sure that this is the type which will come to prevail; and in the great "Englishry," the billion of English-speaking men who a hundred years from now are to occupy the fairest portions of the earth, the American farmer, in his idea, will furnish the type of the new society. There will be few savages, no serfs, or slaves, not many drones or Sybarites, none without civilization. All will be able to read and write, have homes of their own, hold enough land to yield to intelligent industry a good support. They will have no social or political superiors; they will manage for themselves their own business, - Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Society, legislation, administration of affairs, will be to them a most effective means of education. At the head of all, though not necessarily in one nationality with the rest, will stand the United States, our President the foremost man, American ideas (which, as Horace Walpole saw, and we may now so plainly see, are the oldest English ideas), regulating the whole vast society. The dream is rather wild, perhaps," says the Nation, "but we doubt if any one can read it, without, when he lays it down, finding it very hard to furnish a good reason for doubting it."

Without being over-sanguine, we can entertain