Excerpt from England, Vol. 1 of 4 English democracy the vision of the continuous life of a mighty people, and as it quickens faith in that noble ideal of freedom which we have brought as our great contribution to the sum of human effort. Among English-speaking people beyond the seas, where it has a yet greater number of readers than here, it has helped to strengthen the sense of kinship and the reverence for our common past. I have known an American who, reading this History for the first time in middle life, was so stirred by the memories it brought him that he found means to leave his business in one of the Western States and travel to England, that he might visit Ebbsfleet. So strong and direct was the sense which he had gained from our history of the common tie that bound English speaking peoples together, and so generous were the instincts which sprang from such a lofty fellowship, that it came to him as a personal shock, almost as a reproach for the wiping away of which he from his far country earnestly desired to give his efforts, to learn that at the last Mr. Green had not been laid to rest in his own land, but, by one of those infinite renunciations that death exacts, had been in death separated from his people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.