life, and gives to national policy, without the conscious knowledge of any individual citizen, without the direction of statesmen, and perhaps in spite of them all, a continuity of trend, and even an intelligence, by which events may be influenced in a profoundly important way.
The making of some such assumption, helped as it is by the analogy of the bee, seems to be {205} necessary when we consider at all objectively the history of England and her Empire. She has done so much without any leading, so much in spite of her ostensible leaders, so often a great policy or a successful stroke has been apparently accidental. So much of her work that seemed, while it was doing, to be local and narrow in conception and motive displays at a distance evidences of design on the great scale. Her contests with Philip of Spain, with Louis XIV, with Napoleon, and the foundation of her Colonial Empire, would seem to be the grandiose conceptions of some supreme genius did we not know how they were undertaken and in