colonization and aggrandisement seems to be hostile to the development of a common purpose of the most powerful kind. Thus we find moral vigour and stability attaining their greatest strength in a nation that has no definite theory of its destiny, and that is content to allow confusion of thought and vagueness of aim to be common and even characteristic in its public life. In such a people national consciousness is of the most elementary kind, and only the simplest conceptions can be effectively apprehended by it. Negative judgments are in general simpler than positive ones, and the simplest of all, perhaps, is the identification of an enemy. The history of England seems to show with remarkable constancy that the national consciousness has been in its most effective action limited to those elementary conceptions which have been simple and broad enough to manifest themselves in a common purpose of great strength and tenacity. England has, in fact, been made by her enemies. Rightly or wrongly, Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Germany, impressed themselves on the elementary consciousness of England as enemies, and excited in response a unity of purpose that was characteristically as immune from the effects of discouragement, disaster and fatigue as it was independent of reasoned political theory. {230}
Each of these enemies, in contrast with England, had the definite consciousness of a more or less elaborate political aim, and some of them embodied principles or methods in advance of those which obtained in England in corresponding fields. Whatever loftiness of aim they had availed them no more than their respect for principle and the intellect, and they all came to regret the mostly inadvertent effect of their pretensions in exciting the hostility of a people capable of an essential moral cohesion. The power of England would seem to have resided almost exclusively in this capacity for developing under pressure a common purpose. The immense moral energy she has been able to put forth in a crisis has enabled her to inspire such leaders as she has needed for the moment, but she has been characteristically infertile in the