either side in the next inter-imperial war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political rights.  In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the interests of our future opponents as well as those of our fellow-subjects.

This sort of argument might of course be met by a reductio ad absurdum.  If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the victor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of the loser.  After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain.  Both will possess an armament which represents the whole ‘surplus value,’ beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants.  Both will contain white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a wavering line on the map of the world.  But the struggle will go on, and, as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist.  ‘Imperial egoism,’ having worked itself out to its logical conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider the problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from the point of view of mere humanitarianism.

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we might begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further?  Fifteen hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians.  The generals and other ‘Real-politiker’ on both sides may have feared, like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become ‘too cosmopolitan,’ too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology.  ‘This’ a Homoousian may have said ’is a practical matter.  Unless our side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.’  And yet we can now see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned with the question whether ‘we’ or ‘they’ won, but very seriously concerned with the question whether the division itself into ‘we’ or ‘they’ could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no longer intolerable.  May the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards the horrors of a world-war merely because ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ like ‘Homoousia’ and ‘Homoiousia’ are the best that we can do in making entities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe, and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up within them?