There is nothing so very fantastic in this idea of a sort of World-Admiralty; it is not even completely novel.  Such bodies as the Knights Templars transcended nationality in the Middle Ages.  I do not see how some such synthetic control of the seas is to be avoided in the future.  And now coming back to the “White Man’s Burthen,” is there not a possibility that such a board of marine and international control as the naval and international problems of the future may produce (or some closely parallel body with a stronger Latin element), would also be capable of dealing with these barbaric “Administered Territories”?  A day may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be all under one supreme control.  We may be laying the foundations of such a system to-day unawares.  The unstable and fluctuating conferences of the Allies to-day, their repeated experiences of the disadvantages of evanescent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press them almost unconsciously toward this building up of things greater than they know.

We come now to the third and most difficult type of overseas “possessions.”  These are the annexed or conquered regions with settled populations already having a national tradition and culture of their own.  They are, to put it bluntly, the suppressed, the overlaid, nations.  Now I am a writer rather prejudiced against the idea of nationality; my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.  But I have to recognise the facts of the case.  In spite of all my large liberality, I find it less irritating to be ruled by people of my own language and race and tradition, and I perceive that for the mass of people alien rule is intolerable.

Local difference, nationality, is a very obstinate thing.  Every country tends to revert to its natural type.  Nationality will out.  Once a people has emerged above the barbaric stage to a national consciousness, that consciousness will endure.  There is practically always going to be an Egypt, a Poland, an Armenia.  There is no Indian nation, there never has been, but there are manifestly a Bengal and a Rajputana, there is manifestly a constellation of civilised nations in India.  Several of these have literatures and traditions that extend back before the days when the Britons painted themselves with woad.  Let us deal with this question mainly with reference to India.  What is said will apply equally to Burmah or Egypt or Armenia or—­to come back into Europe—­Poland.