Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/15

2 the British Islands; Heligoland, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Isles ; St. Helena, South Africa, much of East and West Africa; enormous territories in India, continually increasing; the whole of Australia; almost all of North America, and I know not how many islands scattered about the Atlantic and Pacific seas. Their geographical spread covers at least one-sixth part of the habitable globe; their power controls about one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth. It is the richest of all the families of mankind. The Anglo-Saxon leads the commerce and the most important manufactures of the world. He owns seven-eighths of the shipping of Christendom, and half that of the human race. He avails himself of the latest discoveries in practical science, and applies them to the creation of "comforts" and luxuries. Iron is his favourite metal; and about two-thirds of the annual iron crop of the earth is harvested on Anglo-Saxon soil. Cotton, wheat, and the potato, are his favourite plants.

The political institutions of the Anglo-Saxon secure National Unity of Action for the State, and Individual Variety of Action for each citizen, to a greater degree than other nations have thought possible. In all Christendom, there is scarce any freedom of the Press except on Anglo-Saxon soil. Ours is the only tongue in which Liberty can speak. Anglo-Saxon Britain is the asylum of exiled patriots, or exiled despots. The royal and patrician wrecks of the revolutionary storms of continental Europe, in the last century and in this, were driven to her hospitable shore. Kossuth, Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and Comte, relics of the last revolution, are washed to the same coast. America is the asvlum of exiled nations, who flee to her arms, four hundred thousand in a year, and find shelter.

The Sclavonians fight with diplomacy and the sword, the Anglo-Saxon with diplomacy and the doUar. He is the Roman of productive industry, of commerce, as the Romans were Anglo-Saxons of destructive conquest, of war. The Sclavonian nations, from the accident of their geographical position, or from their ethnological peculiarity of nature, invade and conquer lands more civilized than their own. They have the diplomatic skill to control nations of superior intellectual and moral development. The Anglo-Saxon is too clumsy for foreign politics; when