Here again we find ourselves asking just that same difficult question of more or less, that arises at every cardinal point of our review of the probable future.  How far is this thing going to be done finely; how far is it going to be done cunningly and basely?  How far will greatness of mind, how far will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jealous and pettifogging spirit that lurks in every human being?  Are French and British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other?  Is the Russian seeking only a necessary outlet to the seas of the world, or has he dreams of Delhi?  Here again, as in all these questions, personal idiosyncrasy comes in; I am strongly disposed to trust the good in the Russian.

But apart from this uncertain question of generosity, there are in this case two powerful forces that make against disputes, secret disloyalties, and meanness.  One is that Germany will certainly be still dangerous at the end of the war, and the second is that the gap in education, in efficiency, in national feeling and courage of outlook, between the European and the great Asiatic and African communities, is rapidly diminishing.  If the Europeans squabble much more for world ascendancy, there will be no world ascendancy for them to squabble for.  We have still no means of measuring the relative enfeeblement of Europe in comparison with Asia already produced by this war.  As it is, certain things are so inevitable—­the integration of a modernised Bengal, of China, and of Egypt, for example—­that the question before us is practically reduced to whether this restoration of the subject peoples will be done with the European’s aid and goodwill, or whether it will be done against him.  That it will be done in some manner or other is certain.

The days of suppression are over.  They know it in every country where white and brown and yellow mingle.  If the Pledged Allies are not disposed to let in light to their subject peoples and prepare for the days of world equality that are coming, the Germans will.  If the Germans fail to be the most enslaving of people, they may become the most liberating.  They will set themselves, with their characteristic thoroughness, to destroy that magic “prestige” which in Asia particularly is the clue to the miracle of European ascendancy.  In the long run that may prove no ill service to mankind.  The European must prepare to make himself acceptable in Asia, to state his case to Asia and be understood by Asia, or to leave Asia.  That is the blunt reality of the Asiatic situation.

It has already been pointed out in these chapters that if the alliance of the Pledged Allies is indeed to be permanent, it implies something in the nature of a Zollverein, a common policy towards the rest of the world and an arrangement involving a common control over the dependencies of all the Allies.  It will be interesting, now that we have sketched a possible map of Europe after the war, to look a little more closely into the nature of the “empires” concerned, and to attempt a few broad details of the probable map of the Eastern hemisphere outside Europe in the years immediately to come.