THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 81 
maxim of English law — often violated, no doubt, in 
evil times, but still forever recognized as a guiding 
principle — that whosoever among the hunted and 
oppressed of other realms should set his foot on the 
sacred soil of Britain became forthwith free, and en- 
titled to all the protection that England’s strong arm 
could afford. On that hospitable soil all types of 
character, all varieties of temperament, all shades of 
belief, have flourished side by side, and have interacted 
upon one another until there has been evolved the 
most plastic, the most energetic, the most self-reliant, 
the most cosmopolitan race of men that has yet lived 
on the earth. 
These considerations begin to make it apparent why 
a people like the English, encountering a people like 
the French in some new part of the world, would natu- 
rally overcome or supplant it. Another circumstance 
implied in the same group of considerations will make 
this still more apparent. I said just now that the 
English alone have succeeded in working up to a 
highly complex form of civilization without essentially 
departing from the primitive Aryan principle of gov- 
ernment. What we may call the “ town-meeting prin- 
ciple,” with which we are so familiar as the logical 
basis of our own American political institutions, was 
essentially the principle on which the early Aryan 
communities governed themselves. The great puzzle 
of nation-making has always been how to secure con- 
certed action on a grand scale without sacrificing this 
principle of local self-government. The political fail- 
ure of ancient Greece was the failure to secure con- 
certed action on a sufficiently large scale. Rome 
succeeded in securing concert of action, but in so 
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