



Produced by Al Haines










[Transcriber's note: transliterated Greek is surrounded by plus signs,
e.g. "+agoniai+".  Italicized text is surrounded by _underscores_.  In
the phrase "_sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_", "[)a]" represents a-breve, "[=e]"
represents e-macron.  "[oe]" represents the oe-ligature pair.]






[Frontispiece: J. A. Cramb]





THE

ORIGINS AND DESTINY


OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN


NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE



BY THE LATE

J. A. CRAMB, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON




WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR




LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1915


_All rights reserved_




[Illustration: Greek text]

"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I determine and
deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and force enough to draw
the mindes both of young and olde to the diligent reading and digesting
of these labours.  For what man is there so despising knowledge, or any
so idle and slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what
policies or by what kinde of government the most part of nations in the
universall world were vanquished, subdued and made subject unto the one
empire of the Romanes, which before that time was never seen or heard?
Or who is there that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or
studie, that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value or
worthy to be esteemed before this?"

_The Histories of the most famous Chronographer_, POLYBIUS.

(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568).




PREFACE

The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in
May, June, and July, 1900.  Their immediate inspiration was the war in
South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in
these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the
ideals and deeds of the present hour.  When the book first appeared,
Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections
by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might
not be without service to his country."  In the same hope his lectures
are now reprinted.




BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May,
1862.  On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he
graduated in 1885, taking 1st Class Honours in Classics.  In the same
year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature.  He
also studied at Bonn University.  He subsequently travelled on the
Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.
Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son.  From 1888 to
1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College,
Glasgow.  Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to
the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and also occasional reviews to
periodicals.  For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service
Commission.  In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of
Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his
death.  He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the
Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres.  In
London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.
His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913,
the subject being the relations between England and Germany.  In
response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures
for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.




CONTENTS


PART I

THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST


LECTURE I

SECTION

   WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY

2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM

3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY


LECTURE II

   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL

1. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS

2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY

3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT


LECTURE III

   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL

1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM

2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY

3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS

4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION



PART II

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN


LECTURE IV

   THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

1. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM

3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY

4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM

5. MILITARISM


LECTURE V

   WHAT IS WAR?

1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY

2. DEFINITION OF WAR

3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR

4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS

5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR

6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR



LECTURE VI

   THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES

1. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE

2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART

3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION

4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY

5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?



LECTURE VII

   THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN

1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

2. THE DESTINY OF MAN

3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY

4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE

5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"

6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE
   MANDATE OF THE PRESENT



NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

1. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY

2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM

3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE




PART I

THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST




  REFLECTIONS ON THE
  ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF
  IMPERIAL BRITAIN


LECTURE I

WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]

The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
impress on the traditions of humanity.  In no period has the burden of
the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
so monotonously.

How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
of a county, proceed to write the History of the World!  And in
speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive
incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
possesses.  But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.

This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
with it silence and utter death.  The deepened significance of history
springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
present.  The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
that invests them with this magic.  Life has become more
self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.

World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
Timeless manifesting itself in Time.  And the distinguishing function
of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.

Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
amongst the world-empires of the past.  I use the phrase "Imperial
Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
associations are inseparable.  It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
the like.  But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
material frame of empire.  With the rise of this spirit, this
consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared.  The unity of
Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
achievement.  The aspirations of the period of the
_Aufklaerung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this
edifice their political realization.  But the incident is not
unprecedented.  Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
obsolete.  It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
under Louis XIV affected it.  But in this unobserved, this silent
growth of Imperial Britain--so unobserved that it presents itself even
now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the
State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
has few, if any, parallels in history.



Sec. I.  THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY

What is the nature of this Consciousness?  What is its historical
basis?  Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?

In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious.  Life's end is then
manifest.  The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
becomes the fixed law of existence.  Such moments inevitably are
difficult to localize.  Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind."  But it is
neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
Napoleon to himself.  So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
to France.  Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
Thrasymene and Cannae.  It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
line.  Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
traces.  But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
Unconscious to the Conscious.  Similarly in the England of the
seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation.  This is
the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers.  It is the unifying
motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century.  The
eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing.  An ideal
from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
eighteenth century.  But from the closing years of the century to the
present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
Britain.

It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
beginnings of great movements in history.  Nevertheless it is often
convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
itself.  And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
Warren Hastings.  There this first awakening consciousness of an
Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
indeed.  Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow.  His conception of history
at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus.  In religion he revered the
traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time.  His
literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
Charles James Fox.  In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
indifferent.  As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs.  But if
his range was narrow, he is master there.  "Within that circle none
durst walk but he."  No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
rhetoric, a mightier language.  And if he is a reactionary in
constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
on violence, but on justice and freedom.  This ideal influences the
action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke.  And in the
seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
hardly be traced at all.  In the speculative politics of that century
we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
part.  I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
of Cromwell as "a great Briton."  Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
Imperial Britain.  His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
not consciously, not deliberately.

In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
us.  The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
definitely, there lost in receding vistas.  On the battlefield or in
the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
is slowly elaborating itself.  And within the nation at large the ideal
which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
clearer consciousness.  Its influence throws a light upon the last
speeches of the younger Pitt.  If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2]  The ideal makes
great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent.  "The Cry of
the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
Nile.  The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
battle-cry of the "Rights of Man."  Thus has this ideal, grown
conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life.  It
removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
they by being free may bring freedom to others.  In the great
renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus.  It imparts to modern
politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.

Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.



Sec. 2.  ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM

Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal
which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
Scotland, and of Ireland?  Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte.  This is the ideal, and in the
resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
of Imperial Britain.

As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task.  This is
the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome.  To spread
the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon.  Similarly of
Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan.  And in
this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
examine in a later lecture.

Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
in a clearer light.  Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
British.  It is not Roman, not Hellenic.  The Roman ideal moulds every
form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
East, down to the eighteenth century.  The theory of the mediaeval
empire derives immediately from Rome.  The Roman justice disguised as
righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial.  The
Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
_Paradiso_.[3]  Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian.  The voluntary or
accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
which it popularized is worth considering.  It is false to the genius
of Rome.  It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words.  _Imperium ac
justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
conceptions of Empire and Freedom.  The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
Rome's name, deifying her genius.  But the ideal of Freedom, the
freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
statesman!  Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find.  The common
traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
of the ancient State.  And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
the most original and varied forms.  The power of the Roman ideal, on
the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France.  Consider how completely the
ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
Rome!

The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
is tedious as a twice-told tale.  Her art, her palaces, are her own
eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
sky.  But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.

Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
But disaster taught Spain nothing--

[Illustration: Greek text]

  Alas, for mortal history!  In happy fortune
  A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
  A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
  And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.


The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
comment than the decline of Spain.[4]

The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
before by Leo III and Charlemagne.

And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
Revolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."

From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
first amongst modern empires, completely breaks.  For it is a new
empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
moulded by a new ideal.

Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
what each brings to the vanquished.

Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
Burgundy and Lorraine.  One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
irresistible strength.  And to the Netherlands what does that army
bring?  Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
_auto-da-fe_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals.  These
things accompany the march of Alva.  And that army of ours which day by
day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
does that army portend?  That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fe_; it brings with it, and not to one
people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_elargissez Dieu!_"--to
liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
with the Divine.  And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."



Sec. 3.  THE MANDATE OF DESTINY

In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race.  The former
nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
end.  It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
natural presence.  Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
condition of man's being.  In the ancient world, government ever tends
to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
that State is imperial.  In the modern, government with concrete
justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
of the State whose ideal is higher.

The vision of the _De Monarchia_--one God, one law, one creed, one
emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in