TOPICS OF THE DAY.
EPOCHS.
[Arnoros OF THE OPENING OF TIM 'YEAR OF GRACE 1858.] Tun grandest growths of history are not always those of which it is possible to trace the origin or determine the extmetion ; nor do we hold in much respect that pedantry which amuses itself with imagining periods or coincidences where they do not exist. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that the actual ex- amples of such correspondencies are so numerous and striking, as sometimes to give rise to the suspicion, that by some mystery which we cannot fathom, arithmetical harmonies either mix themselves up with the ordinations of Providence or are natu- rally evolved in the progress of human affairs. Trace, for example, the analogy suggested by the year now opening for us with a world of work in prospect, which a singu- larly eventful predecessor has provided. We find that for three centuries past the fifty-eighth year of the century has been a most notable one in English history—has probably more than any other, certainly more than any other but one, determined the for- tunes of this country for the succeeding hundred years.
In the year 1558, the premature death of Queen Mary raised to the English throne her half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth,—the person of all others who united the highest genius for govern- ment with the most potent motives to aid in constituting the Pro- testant religion as it was to exist in these kingdoms, and to ad- here to it when constituted.
In the year 1658, the death of Cromwell, hardly less premature in a political sense than that of Mary, paved the way to the Re- storation; and thus rendered it necessary that constitutional liberty should develop itself in England through quite other vicissitudes and in far different forms from what it might had the Protector survived for another dozen years. In the year 1758, William Pitt the elder, after a period of such national disaster and despondency as it is not easy to parallel in English annals, found himself at length uncontrolled master of the English Government, and began to realize his great and novel designs. In his own opinion, which he took no great pains to conceal, he was the only man able to save the country. The na- tion thought the same. The nation found it true. In three years he had wiped away all disasters, raised the country to the foremost place in Europe, and laid in both hemispheres the foundations of that empire which ever since has gone on increasing ; and of the practicability and desirableness of which up to that time no Eng- lishman but himself seems to have had even a vague conception. And now in 1858, the nation is addressing itself, under in some respects new conditions, to determine on what principles, and by what organization, a section of the empire outnumbering fourfold the population of all the rest is to be governed. These are as dominant events, and mark out as distinct periods in the national growth, as any others in our history ; and yet every one of them comes within the precise limit of one hundred years.
That such analogies may be pursued too far, or childishly played with, or perverted to superstitious uses, is no argument against the instruction and admonition which may be gathered from them. Even the puerile or superstitious abuse of them we cease to despise when we perceive how it reacts upon destiny, and tends to produce the very marvels of which it dreams. To this form of mperstition the Mahometans as fatalists are prone beyond all other races. For many years it was a current prophecy at Con- stantinople, that the Turkish dominion would not outlast its four hundredth year from the capture of that city in 1453: and, as Russian intrigue turns everything to account, no doubt this was among the motives why the grand assault on the Turkish empire was fixed for 1853. More recently, we have seen the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plessey chosen for the outbreak of the Hindoo vespers, which, fortunately for England, the stupidity of General Hewitt precipitated by some weeks. Here we perceive that Moslem superstition has again been pulling the wires of the world, and timing to a day the strokes of destiny. Only it is we, and not they, for whom the secular hour has struck. By their savage zeal and dreamy superstition it is brought about that the beginning of the fourth century from the accession of Queen -Elizabeth—at which time, properly speaking, England may be said to have come of age--inaugurates a state of things as novel, dangers as formidable, duties as pressing, responsibilities as al- tered and enlarged, as at any of the correspondent epochs which we have noted—the beginning of a new era, in fact. Nor is it uninstructive to observe, how for years social and political changes at home, the decay of parties, the damage to aristocratic prestige, the cry for a reform of patronage, the spread of educa- tion, and above all the progress of scientific invention, abridging or .annihilating time and distance, have been preparing the nation, and placing new instruments in its hands, for the per- formance of the mighty work to which it is now seen that it can no longer defer addressing itself. Of this, however, we may have other and fitter occasions to speak. At present we deem it not least important to remark,— both for the admonition of our countrymen, and for the rebuke of those. Continental politicians who are for ever declaiming against ambition,—how foreign the thirst for empire naturally is to the English mind, and how recently either the wish for or the possibility of such aggrandizement has become one of the main- springs of the national action. We are not taking all the credit
of this to ourselves ; because probably a good deal of it is due to our insular position. But so it is, that never was European na- tion so little greedy of European territory as ours. And as for the encroachments on other continents, which are all the world over developing themselves into empires or germs of empire, it was individual thirst for liberty or else commercial enterprise that commenced most of them, and the remnant were the prizes of wars undertaken for quite other objects. Down to 1758 and later, the English people thought little and cared less for any other empire than that of the ocean ; to which latter, indeed, they laid rather an exclusive claim, so much so that its very bottom was reckoned to be English ground. A few West India Islands they had, and a strip of colonies on the East coast of America, about which they had no idea except to monopolize them as cus- tomers. The loss of those colonies, too late appreciated, it was, together with the gain of India, that first opened the eyes of the English people to the fact that they were fitted for and destined. to empire beyond any other race upon earth—that their long un- disputed mastery of the seas was but the prelude and pledge of a dominion of the land, which in a hundred years has grown to be the widest, wealthiest, and most populous that ever was known on this earth.
Taken by themselves, the periodicities which we have pointed out might have little claim to rank higher than as "curiosities of history." What raises them above that category, is not so much the great events in individual careers which struck the " secular hour, as the preparative and collateral influences—surges from the high tides of human opinion—which made those events signi- ficant. Even so signal an occurrence as the Indian insurrection, representing as it does the conflict of character and opinion be- tween two great divisions of the human race, need not in itself constitute the end of an old era or the beginning of a new. That depends rather on its concomitants—on the lessons it conveys' and the extent to which they are profited by. It results above allfrom its coming in the rear of other revolutions—putting the climax on a series of changes and influences having a similar tendency. What is it, then that makes an epoch of the year now closed ? What is it that differences the British empire ante from the British empire post? Perhaps this above all things,—that hitherto, great though its power and astonishing its development, that empire had no right to be regarded as more than a provisional one. I or, in the first place, it differed from most previous and all its rival empires, in that being purely maritime in its origin, it wanted coherency and continuity, and never could be made to form a compact and united whole : secondly, its vastly richest and most imperial constituent, India to wit, was notoriously precarious : and thirdly, there was every reason to expect that most of our colonies would, when they reached a certain point in their growth, sever themselves from us as the United States had done. So that practically it seemed not so much an empire, as a sort of half-way- house, nursery, or college, wherein aspirant or adolescent na- tionalities baited, or sojourned in a state of tutelage, and under- went certain discipline, until they were in a position to set up for themselves. So palpably, was this the case, that many people grudged the expense : indeed, the principal leaders of an influen- tial, and as it was thought at that time a growing political party, did not disguise their opinion that we should be better off without colonies at all; and numbers who would have blushed to share that sentiment legislated nevertheless as if some such consumma- tion were inevitable. Nor was this confined to colonies wherein our own race predominated. Our actual and our contem- plated legislation for India was altogether in the same spirit, i. e. to put the Natives on an equality with us, and enable them as soon as possible to do without us.
Not an unwise policy, we dare say, as certainly it was a disin- terested one, so long as the constituents not less than the instru- ments of our empire were scattered the world over, without any means of frequent union or cordial intercourse with us or with each other. Twenty or even ten years ago, none other might seem practicable. But what if new inventions, not isolated or apart e the discoveries of former centuries, but swarming and coopera- tive as a beehive, changed all that, and set about making the whole world near neighbours ? At once the British empire as- sumes quite a different aspect, as regards coherency and perma- nency, from what it did before. Time and space thus brought under subjection, the two chief sources of quarrel between us and our greatest and most English colonies—distance and misintelligence—disappear. For some years now, our North American Colonies have become conscious that they practically enjoy all the prosperity, liberty, and inde- pendence of the United States,. free from the licence and corrup- tion that lower the tone of society and morals in the latter. Our Australian Colonies, endowed with similar privileges, are likely to arrive at the same conclusion.
The assurance which the result of the outbreak of 1857 gives us that we can hold India as long as we like, augments our prestige with our Colonies no less than with foreign nations, and thus gives no slight furtherance to imperial consolidation. Their desire to be one with us becomes greater and our reluctance less. Without India, the Mother-country might dread some day being outweighed and outvoted by her giant offspring. With it, and with the discipline which it generates and the preponder- ance in the world to which it leads, such jealousy disappears for as many centuries as any political organization can be expected to last. From every .point of view, indeed, this strikes us as the great blessing of India, that it is something that will task us to
govern it, and not a settlement of our own race, which almost in the cradle we are forced to allow to govern itself. India holds out a prospect of hard work enough to keep Old England in good health and sound wind for a thousand years.
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