result of the reading of imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council.  The Bismarckian realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South Africa and elsewhere, by ‘blood and iron.’  Lord Milner, who is perhaps the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies.  He still dreams of a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck’s Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those ‘ideas of our youth’ which were ’at once too insular and too cosmopolitan.’[112]

[112] Times, Dec. 19, 1907.

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is now deprived of its only possible psychological basis.  It is to be based not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national variation.  The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm.  To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support.  The loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner’s phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism.  It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea.

At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English ‘poor’ during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other men’s virtues.  They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay little heed to imperial or national frontiers.  It may, however, be objected by our imperial ‘Real-politiker’ that cosmopolitan feeling is at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain facts of our military position.  Our Empire, they say, will have to fight for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value.  If the white inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a ‘dominant race,’ that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into a Bismarckian temper of imperial ‘egoism.’  Among the non-white inhabitants of the Empire (since