Those whose statesmanship consists in some
hand-to-mouth shift for the moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to
look either back to the past or onward to the future, cannot understand
this great fact of our times; and what they cannot understand they mock
at. But the fact exists and does its work in spite of them. And it does
its work none the less because in some cases the feeling of sympathy is
awakened by a claim of kindred, where, in the sense of the physiologist
or the genealogist, there is no kindred at all. The practical view,
historical or political, will accept as members of this or that race or
nation many members whom the physiologist would shut out, whom the
English lawyer would shut out, but whom the Roman lawyer would gladly
welcome to every privilege of the stock on which they were grafted. The
line of the Scipios, of the Caesars, and of the Antonines, was continued
by adoption; and for all practical purposes the nations of the earth
have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters.
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.
BORN 1809.
KIN BEYOND SEA[7]
BY WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.
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