But we will suppose that we are in New York or in Boston,
discussing the policy and power of England. If any one there were to
point to England,--not to the thirty-one millions of population in these
islands, but to her one hundred and fifty millions in India, and nobody
knows how many millions more in every other part of the globe,--might he
not, whilst boasting that America has not covered the ocean with fleets
of force, or left the bones of her citizens to blanch on a hundred
European battle-fields,--might he not fairly say, that England is great
and powerful, and that it is perilous for the world that she is so
great?
But bear in mind that every declaration of this kind, whether from an
Englishman who professes to be strictly English, or from an American
strictly American, or from a Frenchman strictly French,--whether it
asserts in arrogant strains that Britannia rules the waves, or speaks of
'manifest destiny' and the supremacy of the 'Stars and Stripes' or
boasts that the Eagles of one nation, having once overrun Europe, may
possibly repeat the experiment,--I say all this is to be condemned. It
is not truly patriotic; it is not rational; it is not moral.
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