The educated classes were apt to speak in a patronizing tone of the "masses of the people", and to talk of political education as if it were only nee… - James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

[P]erhaps may we find the chief contribution of England to political progress, in the doctrine of the supremacy of law over arbitrary power, in the steady assertion of the principle that every exercise of executive authority may be tested in a court of law to ascertain whether or no it infringes the rights of the subject... It was this guarantee of personal civil rights that most excited the admiration of Continental observers in the eighteenth century, and caused the British Constitution to be taken as the pattern which less fortunate countries should try to imitate. If it be said, and truly said, that this fundamental principle could not have been maintained in England without the assertion by the Parliaments of the fifteenth and, again more forcibly and persistently, by those of the seventeenth century, of control over the power of the Crown, it is to be remembered that their efforts might not have succeeded had not the earlier resistance to that power by the men who secured Magna Carta created and fostered in the minds of the upper and middle classes that firm and constant spirit of independence, that vigilant will to withstand the aggressions of the executive, which overthrew Charles the First and expelled James the Second.

That glorification of national virtues and achievements on which I have been dwelling, might at other times have been a harmless form of pleasure. But it came at a time of keen rivalry, when everything that tended to stimulate racial vanity was caught up and used by those statesmen and other leaders who sought to embark on policies of expansion and aggression even at the cost of rousing national jealousies or embittering national animosities. We all know how vanity may, in individual men, become a powerful spring of action, and intensify energy even while it disturbs the balance of judgment. It is the same with nations. When convinced of their own superiority they may wish to assert it by force, contemning their neighbours, and fancying that they hold a commission from Providence or Fate to improve the rest of the world against its will. As we see to-day that science has made war more hideous and terrible, so we must also confess that learning and literature have done something to prepare nations for war. A sounder learning and a deeper insight might have corrected this danger and taught the peoples that they have at least as much to gain by co-operation as by competition and more to gain from friendship than from hatred. But there is a faculty in man that is sometimes prone to choose the evil and reject the good

The United States are deemed all the world over to be pre-eminently the land of equality. This was the first feature which struck Europeans when they began, after the peace of 1815 had left them time to look beyond the Atlantic, to feel curious about the phenomena of a new society. This was the great theme of Tocqueville's description, and the starting-point of his speculations; this has been the most constant boast of the Americans themselves, who have believed their liberty more complete than that of any other people, because equality has been more fully blended with it.