260 ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION ix 



potential, wealth in all commodities, and in the 

 energy and ability which turn wealth to account, 

 there is something sublime in the vista of the 

 future. Do not suppose that I am pandering to 

 what is commonly understood by national pride. I 

 cannot say that I am in the slightest degree im- 

 pressed by your bigness, or your material resources, 

 as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does 

 not make a nation. The great issue, about which 

 hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of over- 

 hanging fate, is what are you going to do with all 

 these things ? What is to be the end to which 

 these are to be the means ? You are making a 

 novel experiment in politics on the greatest scale 

 which the world has yet seen. Forty millions at 

 your first centenary, it is reasonably to be expected 

 that, at the second, these states will be occupied 

 by two hundred millions of English-speaking 

 people, spread over an area as large as that of 

 Europe, and with climates and interests as diverse 

 as those of Spain and Scandinavia, England and 

 Russia. You and your descendants have to ascer- 

 tain whether this great mass will hold together 

 under the forms of a republic, and the despotic 

 reality of universal suffrage ; whether state rights 

 will hold out against centralisation, without separ- 

 ation ; whether centralisation will get the better, 

 without actual or disguised monarchy; whether 

 shifting corruption is better than a permanent 

 bureaucracy ; and as population thickens in vour 



