And contemporaneously with
all this, the American nation came upon the scene, equipped as no
other nation had ever been, for the task of combining sovereignty with
liberty, indestructible union of the whole with indestructible life in
the parts. The English idea has thus come to be more than national,
it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it has come to stay.
[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire
came to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come
to its end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet
II in 1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as
the Roman idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome
by the English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date,
because it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession
of events. But we can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements
significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the
Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth,
is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of
gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi.
The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period
been the most potent agency in this transfer.
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