Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England

Edward Freeman

Edward A. Freeman

Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England / Two Lectures with an Appendix

PREFACE

These two lectures were given quite independently, the former to the Students’ Association at Edinburgh on December 22nd, 1885, and the latter as a public lecture in the University of Oxford on Washington’s birthday, February 22nd, 1886. As they were written for two different audiences, and as one leading idea ran through both, there was naturally a good deal of repetition, sometimes even to the very words. This I have, in revising them for the press, done my best to get rid of. They appear now as two discourses, looking at the same general subject from two somewhat different points of view, and each putting different points more prominently forward. To these I have added, as an Appendix, such parts as were not immediately temporary of an article which appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine for April, 1885, under the heading of “Imperial Federation.” In this article, written only to be read and not to be heard, some points which were treated in a more rhetorical way in the lectures are dealt with in a style of more minute argument. It seemed therefore to make a fitting commentary on the lectures.

В В В В Cahors,

April 7th, 1886.

GREATER GREECE AND GREATER BRITAIN

The name of Greater Britain is one which of late years has become strangely familiar. It is possible that a generation back the words might have fallen harshly on patriotic ears. We were then used to believe that the Britain in which we lived was so great that there could be none greater. The name of “Great Britain” was perhaps used without any very clear notion of its history; but it was at least accepted as implying greatness of some kind. Whatever may have been the exact meaning with which the name of “Greater Britain” was first brought in, it was, we may be sure, suggested by the seemingly older phrase of “Great Britain.” Those who first spoke of “Greater Britain” perhaps hardly knew that the name is as old as that of “Great Britain,” and, more than this, that “Great Britain” and “Greater Britain” are in truth phrases of exactly the same meaning. I would not venture to say how much older the name of “Magna Britannia” may be than its somewhat irregular employment in the royal style by James Sixth and First. But “Greater Britain,” “Major Britannia,” is undoubtedly as old as the twelfth century. We perhaps sometimes forget that, besides this our isle of Britain, there is another Britain on the continent, no other than the land which, by a slight change of ending, we commonly call Britanny. But in Latin and in French the two names are the same, Britannia and Bretagne. The one land is Bretagne, the other is Grande-Bretagne; the one is Britannia minor, the other is Britannia major. In short, the Britain of the island, the Great or Greater Britain, was so called simply to distinguish it from the Lesser Britain on the mainland.

Here, be it remarked, the Greater Britain is the older, the Lesser is the younger; the Greater is the mother-country, the Lesser is the colony. The Lesser Britain of the mainland never took that name till it was settled by men fleeing from the Greater Britain in the island. Now in the sense in which we have of late years heard the phrase “Greater Britain,” all this has been turned the other way. “Great Britain” is not simply opposed to a Lesser Britain; it is opposed to a Britain which is confessedly great, but, it would seem, not so great as the Greater. And of these the one which is simply Great is the elder; the Greater is the younger; the Great is the mother-country, the ruling country; the Lesser is the plantation, the dependency, or rather an aggregate of plantations and dependencies all over the world. The change, the contrast, between the old use of “Major Britannia” and the new use of “Greater Britain” is so very singula