No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted anything of this sort, but no empire like the British has ever yet existed.  Its conditions and needs are unprecedented, its consolidation is a new problem, to be solved, if it is solved at all, by untried means.  And in the English language as a vehicle of thought and civilisation alone is that means to be found.

Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time the British Empire is giving its constituent peoples any such high and rewarding civilisation as I am here suggesting.  It gives them a certain immunity from warfare, a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoods and peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic, narrow-minded, and unattractive officialism.  No adequate effort is being made to render the English language universal throughout its limits, none at all to use it as a medium of thought and enlightenment.  Half the good things of the human mind are outside English altogether, and there is not sufficient intelligence among us to desire to bring them in.  If one would read honest and able criticism, one must learn French; if one would be abreast of scientific knowledge and philosophical thought, or see many good plays or understand the contemporary European mind, German.

And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every good foreign thing done into English as it appeared.  It needs only a little understanding and a little organisation to ensure the immediate translation of every significant article, every scientific paper of the slightest value.  The effort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities for research, and all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would be altogether trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect.

But English people do not understand these things.  Their Empire is an accident.  It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, and in the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of their commonplace and dull-minded leaders.  Empire has happened to them and civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits.  They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to keep.  Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raises men above locality and habit, all that can justify and consolidate the Empire, is nothing to them.  They are provincials mocked by a world-wide opportunity, the stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles.  They go out of town for the “shootin’,” and come back for the fooleries of Parliament, and to see what the Censor has left of our playwrights and Sir Jesse Boot of our writers, and to dine in restaurants and wear clothes.