Page:15 decisive battles of the world Vol 2 (London).djvu/246

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238
VICTORY OF THE AMERICANS

Central and Southern America, seems a matter of secondary importance. Well may we repeat De Tocqueville's words, that the growing power of this commonwealth is, "Un fait entièrement nouveau dans le monde, et dont l'imagination ellemême ne saurait saisir la portée."

An Englishman may look, and ought to look, on the growing grandeur of the Americans, with no small degree of generous sympathy and satisfaction. They, like ourselves, are members of the great Anglo-Saxon nation, "whose race and language are now overrunning the world from one end of it to the other."[1] And whatever differences of form of government may exist between us and them; whatever reminiscences of the days when, though brethren, we strove together, may rankle in the minds of us, the defeated party; we should cherish the bonds of common nationality that still exist between us. We should remember, as the Athenians remembered of the Spartans, at a season of jealousy and temptation, that our race is one, being of the same blood, speaking the same language, having an essential resemblance in our institutions and usages, and worshipping in the temples of the same God.[2]

  1. Arnold.
  2. Εὸν ὄμαιμὀν τε καὶ ὀμὀγλωσσον, καὶ Θεῶν ίδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ δυσὶαι, ἢθεά τε ὀμὀτροπα.—Herodotus, viii. 144.