Is a future Gibbon to illustrate another " Decline and Fall"?—Author, chap. ix.
There arises, said the president, in conclusion, but one shade over the general brightness of this picture. The great British Empire, of which, covering, as it did, one-ninth part of the habitable globe, our ancestors of the nineteenth century were so justly proud, is now, so far, at least, as regards the whole of this grand area and its advanced population, a thing of the past, and alive only in the page of history. Seeing, however, that all international war has long ago come to an end over the world, the break up of a power that might have been unchallengeably the greatest on the earth, has happily, on that account, proved the less dangerous to its people, and in that view also, possibly, the less mortifying. Nevertheless a pang of national agony shot through us all, during the past century, when we did actually realize, albeit too late for remedy, that, as the result of long-previous easy-going political negligence, the grand old empire had gone to pieces. Indeed, but for the self-condemning conviction that all parties and classes amongst us had been much alike to blame for the national disaster, there might not have been wanting, to the intensity of first regrets, a revolutionary tendency towards other forms of government which had happily proved so much more successful in banding firmly and permanently together the component sections of another great empire of the English race.
