But meanwhile has not this been very much the case with our critics
themselves? Leading British statesmen may be more accomplished scholars
than ours, Parliament may be more elegantly bored than Congress; but we
have a rooted conviction that commonplace thought and shallow principles
do not change their nature, even though disguised in the English of
Addison himself. Mr. Gladstone knows vastly more Greek than Mr. Chase,
but we may be allowed to doubt if he have shown himself an abler
finance-minister. Since the beginning of the present century it is safe
to say that England has produced no statesmen whom her own historians
will pronounce to be more than second- or third-rate men. The Crimean
War found her, if her own journalists were to be believed, without a
single great captain whether on land or sea, with incompetence in every
department, civil and military, and driven to every shift, even to
foreign enlistment and subsidy, to put on foot an army of a hundred
thousand men. What an opportunity for sermonizing on the failure of
representative government! In that war England lost much of her old
prestige in the eyes of the world, and felt that she had lost it.
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