Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/95

 that the mere mechanical multiplying for this end of manufactures and population threatens to create for us vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people." Even taking wealth alone as a factor in the making of a people, its fair distribution is more important than its rapid production. But in the making of Britain, its love of freedom and institutions of freedom are more important to the world than its material well-being. But the love, interest and admiration of mankind will be secured for Britain not so much on account of the magnitude of its developed material resources or its political institutions, as that it counts among its sons and daughters, Shakespere, Milton, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, George Eliot. They are types of the true makers of Britain. They were beings possessing special power and genius. Matthew Arnold remarks that what constitutes special power and genius in a man seems often to be his blending with the basis of his national temperament some additional gift or grace not proper to that temperament. A great nation likewise owes its pre-eminence to blending with