Size is not grandeur, and territory
does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true
sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to
do with all these things? What is to be the end to which these are to be
the means? You are making a novel experiment in politics on the greatest
scale which the world has yet seen. Forty millions at your first
centenary, it is reasonably to be expected that, at the second, these
states will be occupied by two hundred millions of English-speaking
people, spread over an area as large as that of Europe, and with
climates and interests as diverse as those of Spain and Scandinavia,
England and Russia. You and your descendants have to ascertain whether
this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic, and
the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether state rights will
hold out against centralisation, without separation; whether
centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised
monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent
bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the
pressure of want is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk
among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard.
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