The English Parliament
goes to the people as often as the Government, in any of its proposed
measures, fails of a majority. The suffrage is constantly enlarging,
and the rights of labor are almost as carefully guarded by the laws
of England as by ours.
England's treatment of Ireland has been harsh, severe, unjust; and yet
even there the spirit of a larger liberty in the interest of the Irish
tenant, approaching state socialism, compels the landlord to sell his
land whether he wants to or not, at a price fixed by others than
himself, and enables the tenant to buy the land by the payment of his
rent. Tolerance, justice, and individual liberty are daily developing
throughout the British Empire, instead of diminishing.
And yet England has no written constitution. But she has institutions,
free institutions, institutions similar to those we have here in
America. It is the free institutions of England that preserve and
increase the liberty of Englishmen, and diminish and destroy the
authority of the monarch, who is now only the personification of the
nation, the emblem of the Empire.
It is England's free institutions that, in Egypt, in Hongkong, in
Ceylon, in the Malay states, in India, have given the people of those
dark places some of the fruits of liberty to eat for the first time in
all the strange history of the oppressed and wasted Orient.
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