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[Footnote: The writer some time ago gave a lecture before the Royal Institution on "The Influence of Geographical Circumstances on Political Character," using Rome and England as illustrations. It may perhaps be right to say that the present paper, which touches here and there on matters of political opinion, is not identical with the latter portion of that lecture.]

Two large islands lie close to that Continent which has hitherto been selected by Nature as the chief seat of civilization. One island is much larger than the other, and the larger island lies between the smaller and the Continent. The larger island is so placed as to receive primaeval immigration from three quarters—from France, from the coast of Northern Germany and the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia, the transit being rendered somewhat easier in the last case by the prevailing winds and by the little islands which Scotland throws out, as resting-places and guides for the primaeval navigator, into the Northern Sea. The smaller island, on the other hand, can hardly receive immigration except through the larger, though its southern ports look out, somewhat ominously to the eye of history, towards Spain. The western and northern parts of the larger island are mountainous, and it is divided into two very unequal parts by the Cheviot Hills and the mosses of the Border. In the larger island are extensive districts well suited for grain. The climate of most of the smaller is too wet for grain and good only for pasture. The larger island is full of minerals and coal, of which the smaller island is almost destitute. These are the most salient features of the scene of English history, and, with a temperate climate, the chief physical determinants of English destiny.

What, politically speaking, are the special attributes of an island? In the first place, it is likely to be settled by a bold and enterprising race. Migration by land under the pressure of hunger or of a stronger tribe, or from the mere habit of wandering, calls for no special effort of courage or intelligence on the part of the nomad. Migration by sea does: to go forth on a strange element at all, courage is required; but we can hardly realize the amount of courage required to go voluntarily out of sight of land. The first attempts at ship-building also imply superior intelligence, or an effort by which the intelligence will be raised. Of the two great races which make up the English nation, the Celtic had only to pass a channel which you can see across, which perhaps in the time of the earliest migration did not exist. But the Teutons, who are the dominant race and have supplied the basis of the English character and institutions, had to pass a wider sea. From Scandinavia, especially, England received, under the form of freebooters, who afterwards became conquerors and settlers, the very core and sinews of her maritime population, the progenitors of the Blakes and Nelsons. The Northman, like the Phoenician, had a country too narrow for him, and timber for ship-building at hand. But the land of the Phoenician was a lovely land, which bound him to itself; and wherever he moved his heart still turned to the pleasant abodes of Lebanon and the sunlit quays of Tyre. Thus he became a merchant, and the father of all who have made the estranging sea a highway and a bond between nations, more than atoning by the service thus rendered to humanity, for his craft, his treachery, his cruelty, and his Moloch- worship. The land of the Scandinavian was not a lovely land, though it was a land suited to form strong arms, strong hearts, chaste natures, and, with purity, strength of domestic affection. He was glad to exchange it for a sunnier dwelling-place, and thus, instead of becoming a merchant, he became the founder of Norman dynasties in Italy, France, and England. We are tempted to linger over the story of these primaeval mariners, for nothing equals it in romance. In our day Science has gone before the most adventurous barque, limiting the possibilities of discovery, disenchanting the enchanted Seas, and depriving us for ever of Sinbad and Ulysses. But the Phoenician and the Northman put forth into a really unknown world. The Northman, moreover, was so far as we know the first ocean sailor. If the story of the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians is true, it was an astonishing enterprise, and almost dwarfs modern voyages of discovery. Still it would be a coasting voyage, and the Phoenician seems generally to have hugged the land. But the Northman put freely out into the wild Atlantic, and even crossed it before Columbus, if we may believe a legend made specially dear to the Americans by the craving of a new country for antiquities. It has been truly said, that the feeling of the Greek, mariner as he was, towards the sea, remained rather one of fear and aversion, intensified perhaps by the treacherous character of the squally AEgean; but the Northman evidently felt perfectly at home on the ocean, and rode joyously, like a seabird, on the vast Atlantic waves.

Not only is a race which comes by sea likely to be peculiarly vigorous, self-reliant, and inclined, when settled, to political liberty, but the very process of maritime migration can scarcely fail to intensify the spirit of freedom and independence. Timon or Genghis Khan, sweeping on from land to land with the vast human herd under his sway, becomes more despotic as the herd grows larger by accretion, and the area of its conquests is increased. But a maritime migration is a number of little joint stock enterprises implying limited leadership, common counsels, and a good deal of equality among the adventurers. We see in fact that the Saxon immigration resulted in the foundation of a number of small communities which, though they were afterwards fused into seven or eight petty kingdoms and ultimately into one large kingdom, must, while they existed, have fostered habits of local independence and self-government. Maritime migration would also facilitate the transition from the tribe to the nation, because the ships could hardly be manned on purely tribal principles; the early Saxon communities in England appear in fact to have been semi-tribal, the local bond predominating over the tribal, though a name with a tribal termination is retained. Room would scarcely be found in the ships for a full proportion of women; the want would be supplied by taking the women of the conquered country; and thus tribal rules of exclusive intermarriage, and all barriers connected with them, would be broken down.

Another obvious attribute of an island is freedom from invasion. The success of the Saxon invaders may be ascribed to the absence of strong resistance. The policy of Roman conquest, by disarming the natives, had destroyed their military character, as the policy of British conquest has done in India, where races which once fought hard against the invader under their native princes, such as the people of Mysore, are now wholly unwarlike. Anything like national unity, or power of co- operation against a foreign enemy, had at the same time been extirpated by a government which divided that it might command. The Northman in his turn owed his success partly to the want of unity among the Saxon principalities, partly and principally to the command of the sea which the Saxon usually abandoned to him, and which enabled him to choose his own point of attack, and to baffle the movements of the defenders. When Alfred built a fleet, the case was changed.

William of Normandy would scarcely have succeeded, great as his armament was, had it not been for the diversion effected in his favour by the landing of the Scandinavian pretender in the North, and the failure of provisions in Harold's Channel fleet, which compelled it to put into port. Louis of France was called in as a deliverer by the barons who were in arms against the tyranny of John; and it is not necessary to discuss the Tory description of the coming of William of Orange as a conquest of England by the Dutch. Bonaparte threatened invasion, but unhappily was unable to invade: unhappily we say, because if he had landed in England he would assuredly have there met his doom; the Russian campaign would have been antedated with a more complete result, and all the after-pages in the history of the Arch-Brigand would have been torn from the book of fate. England is indebted for her political liberties in great measure to the Teutonic character, but she is also in no small measure indebted to this immunity from invasion which has brought with it a comparative immunity from standing armies. In the Middle Ages the question between absolutism and that baronial liberty which was the germ and precursor of the popular liberty of after-times turned in great measure upon the relative strength of the national militia and of the bands of mercenaries kept in pay by overreaching kings. The bands of mercenaries brought over by John proved too strong for the patriot barons, and would have annulled the Great Charter, had not national liberty found a timely and powerful, though sinister, auxiliary in the ambition of the French. Prince Charles I. had no standing army, the troops taken into pay for the wars with Spain and France had been disbanded before the outbreak of the Revolution; and on that occasion the nation was able to overthrow the tyranny without looking abroad for assistance. But Charles II. had learned wisdom from his father's fate; he kept up a small standing army; and the Whigs, though at the crisis of the Exclusion Bill they laid their hands upon their swords, never ventured to draw them, but allowed themselves to be proscribed, their adherents to be ejected from the corporations, and their leaders to be brought to the scaffold. Resistance was in the same way rendered hopeless by the standing army of James II., and the patriots were compelled to stretch their hands for aid to William of Orange. Even so, it might have gone hard with them if James's soldiers, and above all Churchill, had been true to their paymaster. Navies are not political; they do not overthrow constitutions; and in the time of Charles I. it appears that the leading seamen were Protestant, inclined to the side of the Parliament. Perhaps Protestantism had been rendered fashionable in the navy by the naval wars with Spain.

A third consequence of insular position, especially in early times, is isolation. An extreme case of isolation is presented by Egypt, which is in fact a great island in the desert. The extraordinary fertility of the valley of the Nile produced an early development, which was afterwards arrested by its isolation, the isolation being probably intensified by the jealous exclusiveness of a powerful priesthood which discouraged maritime pursuits. The isolation of England, though comparatively slight, has still been an important factor in her history. She underwent less than the Continental provinces the influence of Roman Conquest. Scotland and Ireland escaped it altogether, for the tide of invasion, having flowed to the foot of the Grampians, soon ebbed to the line between the Solway and the Tyne. Britain has no monuments of Roman power and civilization like those which have been left in Gaul and Spain, and of the British Christianity of the Roman period hardly a trace, monumental or historical, remains. By the Saxon conquest England was entirely severed for a time from the European system. The missionary of ecclesiastical Rome recovered what the legionary had lost. Of the main elements of English character political and general, five were brought together when Ethelbert and Augustine met on the coast of Kent. The king represented Teutonism; the missionary represented Judaism, Christianity, imperial and ecclesiastical Rome. We mention Judaism as a separate element, because, among other things, the image of the Hebrew monarchy has certainly entered largely into the political conceptions of Englishmen, perhaps at least as largely as the image of Imperial Rome. A sixth element, classical Republicanism, came in with the Reformation, while the political and social influence of science is only just beginning to be felt. Still, after the conversion of England by Augustine, the Church, which was the main organ of civilization, and almost identical with it in the early Middle Ages, remained national; and to make it thoroughly Roman and Papal, in other words to assimilate it completely to the Church of the Continent, was the object of Hildebrand in promoting the enterprise of William. Roman and Papal the English Church was made, yet not so thoroughly so as completely to destroy its insular and Teutonic character. The Archbishop of Canterbury was still Papa alterius orbis; and the struggle for national independence of the Papacy commenced in England long before the struggle for doctrinal reform. The Reformation broke up the confederated Christendom of the Middle Ages, and England was then thrown back into an isolation very marked, though tempered by her sympathy with the Protestant party on the Continent. In later times the growth of European interests, of commerce, of international law, of international intercourse, of the community of intellect and science, has been gradually building again, on a sounder foundation than that of the Latin Church, the federation of Europe, or rather the federation of mankind. The political sympathy of England with Continental nations, especially with France, has been increasing of late in a very marked manner, the French Revolution of 1830 told at once upon the fortunes of English Reform, and the victory of the Republic over the reactionary attempt of May was profoundly felt by both parties in England. Placed too close to the Continent not to be essentially a part of the European system, England has yet been a peculiar and semi-independent part of it. In European progress she has often acted as a balancing and moderating power. She has been the asylum of vanquished ideas and parties. In the seventeenth century, when absolutism and the Catholic reaction prevailed on the Continent, she was the chief refuge of Protestantism and political liberty. When the French Revolution swept Europe, she threw herself into the anti-revolutionary scale. The tricolor has gone nearly round the world, at least nearly round Europe; but on the flag of England still remains the religious symbol of the era before the Revolution.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke. It finds, perhaps, its strongest expression in the saying of Milton that the manner of God is to reveal things first to His Englishmen. It has made Englishmen odious even to those who, like the Spaniards, have received liberation or protection from English hands. It stimulated the desperate desire to see France rid of the "Goddams" which inspired Joan of Arc. For an imperial people it is a very unlucky peculiarity, since it precludes not only fusion but sympathy and almost intercourse with the subject races. The kind heart of Lord Elgin, when he was Governor- General of India, was shocked by the absolute want of sympathy or bond of any kind, except love of conquest, between the Anglo-Indian and the native, and the gulf apparently, instead of being filled up, now yawns wider than ever.

It is needless to dwell on anything so obvious as the effect of an insular position in giving birth to commerce and developing the corresponding elements of political character. The British Islands are singularly well placed for trade with both hemispheres; in them, more than in any other point, may be placed the commercial centre of the world. It may be said that the nation looked out unconsciously from its cradle to an immense heritage beyond the Atlantic. France and Spain looked the same way, and became competitors with England for ascendancy in the New World, but England was more maritime, and the most maritime was sure to prevail. Canada was conquered by the British fleet. To the commerce and the maritime enterprise of former days, which were mainly the results of geographical position, has been added within the last century the vast development of manufactures produced by coal and steam, the parents of manufactures, as well as the expansion of the iron trade in close connection with manufactures. Nothing can be more marked than the effect of industry on political character in the case of England. From being the chief seat of reaction, the North has been converted by manufactures into the chief seat of progress. The Wars of the Roses were not a struggle of political principle; hardly even a dynastic struggle; they had their origin partly in a patriotic antagonism to the foreign queen and to her foreign councils; but they were in the main a vast faction-fight between two sections of an armed and turbulent nobility turned into buccaneers by the French wars, and, like their compeers all over Europe, bereft, by the decay of Catholicism, of the religious restraints with which their morality was bound up. Yet the Lancastrian party, or rather the party of Margaret of Anjou and her favourites, was the more reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the absence of commerce with the Continent, and by border wars with Scotland. In the South was the seat of prosperous industry, wealth, and comparative civilization, and the banners of the Southern cities were in the armies of the House of York. The South accepted the Reformation, while the North was the scene of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Coming down to the Civil War in the time of Charles I., we find the Parliament strong in the South and East, where are still the centres of commerce and manufactures, even the iron trade, which has its smelting works in Sussex. In the North the feudal tie between landlord and tenant, and the sentiment of the past, preserve much of their force, and the great power in those parts is the Marquis of Newcastle, at once great territorial lord of the Middle Ages and elegant grand seigneur of the Renaissance, who brings into the field a famous regiment of his own retainers. In certain towns, such as Bradford and Manchester, there are germs of manufacturing industry, and these form the sinews of the Parliamentarian party in the district which is headed by the Fairfaxes. But in the Reform movement which extended through the first half of the present century, the geographical position of parties was reversed; the swarming cities of the North were then the great centres of Liberalism and the motive power of Reform; while the South, having by this time fallen into the hands of great landed proprietors, was Conservative. The stimulating effect of populous centres on opinion is a very familiar fact; even in the rural districts it is noticed by canvassers at elections that men who work in gangs are generally more inclined to the Liberal side than those who work separately.

In England, however, the agricultural element always has been and remains a full counterpoise to the manufacturing and commercial element. Agricultural England is not what Pericles called Attica, a mere suburban garden, the embellishment of a queenly city. It is a substantive interest and a political power. In the time of Charles I. it happened that, owing to the great quantity of land thrown into the market in consequence of the confiscation of the monastic estates, which had slipped through the fingers of the spendthrift courtiers to whom they were at first granted, small freeholders were very numerous in the South, and these men like the middle class in the towns, being strong Protestants, went with the Parliament against the Laudian reaction in religion. But land in the hands of great proprietors is Conservative, especially when it is held under entails and connected with hereditary nobility; and into the hands of great proprietors the land of England has now entirely passed. The last remnant of the old yeomen freeholders departed in the Cumberland Statesmen, and the yeoman freeholder in England is now about as rare as the other. Commerce has itself assisted the process by giving birth to great fortunes, the owners of which are led by social ambition to buy landed estates, because to land the odour of feudal superiority still clings, and it is almost the necessary qualification for a title. The land has also actually absorbed a large portion of the wealth produced by manufactures, and by the general development of industry; the estates of Northern landowners especially have enormously increased in value, through the increase of population, not to mention the not inconsiderable appropriation of commercial wealth by marriage. Thus the Conservative element retains its predominance, and it even seems as though the land of Milton, Vane, Cromwell, and the Reformers of 1832, might after all become, politically as well as territorially, the domain of a vast aristocracy of landowners, and the most reactionary instead of the most progressive country in Europe.

Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than willing to enter the privileged circle. This junction is at present the great fact of English politics, and was the main cause of the overthrow of the Liberal Government in 1874. The growth of the great cities itself seems likely, as the number of poor householders increases, to furnish Reaction with auxiliaries in the shape of political Lazzaroni capable of being organized by wealth in opposition to the higher order of workmen and the middle class. In Harrington's "Oceana," there is much nonsense, but it rises at least to the level of Montesquieu in tracing the intimate connection of political power, even under elective institutions, with wealth in land.

Hitherto, the result of the balance between the landowning and commercial elements has been steadiness of political progress, in contrast on the one hand to the commercial republics of Italy, whose political progress was precocious and rapid but shortlived, and on the other hand to great feudal kingdoms where commerce was comparatively weak. England, as yet, has taken but few steps backwards. It remains to be seen what the future may bring under the changed conditions which we have just described. English commerce, moreover, may have passed its acme. Her insular position gave Great Britain during the Napoleonic wars, with immunity from invasion, a monopoly of manufactures and of the carrying trade. This element of her commercial supremacy is transitory, though others, such as the possession of coal, are not.