Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/218

 As we still embrace great India, as well as many various other places of the like mixed dependency character over the world, which, with that world's general advance, give us collectively already a population and commerce far beyond those even of the undivided empire at its highest united attainment, we are fain to gather crumbs of comfort, and to dwell upon the greatness still left to us. But we have definitively lost the vast areas of Northern America, Southern Africa, and Australasia. They all remain perfectly friendly to us, as indeed does all the rest of the world; and at, and for long after, the time of parting, there was a profuse outpouring of loyal allegiance to the old associations and memories, with vows of eternal brotherhood, and so on. But none the less the substance has departed from beneath the shadow, and the great nationality is dissipated.

The untoward event happened in this way. Our colonies, as they became important and self-supporting, during the nineteenth century, demanded, and were cordially conceded, the constitutional or self-government of the parental type. They were then perfectly satisfied, and perfectly loyal, and nothing seemed wanting to harmony on either side. But separative elements and causes gradually arose, with the many differing circumstances of all these remote and practically self-governed societies. While they were still respectively, and even collectively, small, as compared with their overshadowing parent, and still moved by home rather than by local or colonial influences and remembrances, there were no great difficulties in sufficiently preserving at least an entire legal unity to the empire; for in all important colonial