W. F. Monypenny

“ Now, as Britons who have felt the attraction of the Imperial ideal dimly see, the reconstituted Empire of their dreams would be specially fitted under the new conditions for the office of mediator between the great combinations around it, specially adapted to be the central or regulating State of the world in the coming time. It is here that we begin to perceive a reach of significance in their ideal wider than the merely esoteric, here that we find the connection between the Imperialism of to-day and the Imperialism of Rome in its grander aspects, or the sublime ideals of the Middle Ages. ”

“ The British Empire, on the other hand, as long as it retains the command of the sea—as long, that is to say, as it exists—can make its presence felt in every quarter of the globe accessible by sea. It holds, in fact, a power whose exercise is in a sense a trust, a power to which every other State in some degree rives hostages, and which is mighty for purposes of defence, but beyond a certain point is impotent for purposes of aggression. ”

“ The dream of political unity, the majestic theory of the Universal Empire corresponding to the Universal Church, with its head, the Emperor, the crown of the feudal system and the earthly King of kings, was only perhaps a dream, a theory, an aspiration; but it remains in many ways the noblest, the most coherent, and the most satisfying political ideal yet conceived by the mind of man, and it as invested the Middle Ages with a grandeur to which our modern world, with all its manifest gains and advantages, has not yet attained. ”

“ The three great conflicts of the last seven years—the American War with Spain, our own war in South Africa, and the war just concluded between Russia and Japan—have none of them been fought in Europe, and have been wholly concerned with questions of dominion far beyond the bounds of Europe.
It is not, perhaps, an accident that one of the new Powers which owe their existence to the national enthusiasm of the last century should have been a main instrument of the change. No sooner had Germany achieved internal unity than she began to look about in the outside world for fresh fields of activity. ”

“ From the time of the Crusades, or, if you choose to regard the Crusades as religious rather than political in their significance, from the time of Henry the Navigator, Europe has, from small beginnings and, at first, by tentative steps, been overrunning the world: she has been stretching out her hands over the remainder of the globe, and been drawing it under her control or within the orbit of her civilization. ”

“ At the centre, to pursue our examination, we have the nation to whose political genius the Empire owes its existence—a nation renowned, apart from its other achievements, as the parent of free government wherever it exists, and as having carried it in her own case to perhaps its highest pitch of perfection. ”

“ But if the Imperial ideal were only an appeal to the lust of conquest, it would not possess the immense attraction it now possesses for the best minds of our generation. It is not the mere glorification of conquest and dominion as compared with internal improvement; it is not the mere preference of power to freedom; it is not the enemy of nationality and liberty. ”

“ And when in a similar manner the French Revolution had shaken the whole edifice of political order to its foundations, the Empire of Napoleon sprang into being—short-lived, indeed, yet a splendid if premature and ill-directed effort towards the attainment of that political unity which is the essence of the Imperial ideal, and of which mankind has never wholly lost sight since the days of Julius Cæsar. ”

“ The impulse to expansion, on the other hand, has saved Europe from the stagnancy of isolation; it has brought the civilization she has evolved by a long process of self-discipline within the reach of humanity at large, and has broadened her own horizon till it includes the world in its sweep. This impulse, indeed, has had a certain affinity to the Roman Imperialism of conquest, which, if unchecked, would have led us back to Roman despotism. Yet in their several ways both the expansive impulse and the movement of national enfranchisement have been leading us to a larger atmosphere ”

“ We are trying to discover the germ of a new political organism, to arrive at a new political conception wider than nationality yet capable of finding a place for nationality, to discern a new political ideal. Now, the very breadth of these Empire States lifts them in a sense above mere nationalism, and gives them a certain universality. In all three there is present, in a greater or less degree, the element of nationality; while, on the other hand, all three owe their present breadth and greatness to the movement of conquest or expansion. ”

“ They are virtually independent in their Governments. The supremacy of the Imperial Parliament has lost all practical importance in the present, and does not even appear to contain the germ of any useful development in the future. Their allegiance is not to the parent Parliament, nor even to the parent nation, but to the common throne and Empire in which, indeed, they have a common citizenship of profound significance and value—a significance and value that, with our eyes fixed on the mere machinery of government, we are sometimes too apt to forget. ”

“ Our Empire could play the part of the Imperator Pacificus for whom the Middle Ages longed, and it could do it, not by holding the nations of the earth in the iron grip of Rome, but while leaving full scope for the free play of the multitudinous forces of humanity in all their legitimate fields of action. ”

“ China may awake from her lethargy and take the place beside them to which her population would entitle her, or less probably, if China proves to be not asleep but dead, Japan may become the head of a vast Empire in Eastern Asia, which would add her to the list; Germany, so strong as a national power in Europe, may succeed in winning a place among the world Powers of the future; and in South America a great Latin organization may arise to confront the United States on her own continent. ”

“ The rise of nationality and the progress of human enfranchisement may be taken to be but different phases of the same thing, and it is, in fact, impossible to disentangle their history. Nationality has been at once the product and the instrument of the revolution—if we may use the latter word as a name for the whole great movement of revolt against the mediaeval order, and not in its conventional sense as the name for one phase of this movement, the political revolution that began in the eighteenth century. ”

“ If we look to the special form of military force that they must continue to wield, we are pointed to the same conclusion. With its centre in an island of the sea, and divided into a thousand fragments that communicate only by the sea, the Empire depends essentially upon sea-power; and it is of the very essence of sea-power, above all in these days of steam, to be one and indivisible, and therefore, in the hands of the dominant Power, to be universal. ”

“ Roman in its origin, the word 'Empire' has retained more than a flavour of association from its original use. The Roman Empire was not only the first in history to bear the name, but also the first to which with any fitness the name can be applied. What we vaguely describe as the Ancient Empires of the East were little more than mechanical aggregates of territory and population with no principle of union or assimilative power, and with no real vitality or possibility of endurance. The Roman Empire was on a far higher plane, and had a far higher mission. ”

“ The vision of a future before it, longer and more glorious than its past, has seized hold of the imagination of men of the British race, and become their main political inspiration. It is in this hope, this faith, this vision, that for Britons the Imperial ideal is embodied ”

“ With freedom went energy and resisting power, as was seen when the wave of conquest had spent itself, and the returning tide of barbarism began to press inwards from without. But for the spread of Christianity, the Empire would have fallen to pieces much sooner than it did; but the triumph of the new faith infused into it fresh vitality, gave it a living principle of cohesion, and for a time promised to consolidate its population into one great Christian nationality on the basis of the Græco-Roman civilization. ”

“ But the fact has more importance when we think of the immeasurable range of interests it implies, of the immeasurable variety of the parts of which the Empire is composed, of the immeasurable complexity of its government and institutions. It includes, besides several free and self-governing nations, a vast and populous Empire in India, islands in every sea, territory on every continent; among its subjects representatives of every race on the face of the earth, and in its political institutions, in the relations between Government and governed, nearly every mode known to man. ”

“ To the sublime system of the Middle Ages there had succeeded a chaos of warring nationalities and warring religions, amid which all hope of unity speedily disappeared. The very ideals of the Middle Ages perished or ceased to be intelligible. With the Reformation the Universal Church was shattered into fragments, and it soon began to be forgotten that the Universal Empire had ever claimed to be universal. ”

“ In the first instance, indeed, Roman Imperialism was little more than an Imperialism of conquest; but it was a conquest that ultimately justified itself as a furtherance to civilization. Historically, the Roman dominion served the purpose of breaking down the barriers of tribe, and race, and city, that separated the various peoples round the shores of the Mediterranean; in widening their horizons, hitherto restricted in a degree which it is difficult for us to realize or understand; in drawing to a focus all the scattered elements of civilization in the ancient world ”

“ The very things that, up to a certain point, contributed to their insularity, the comparatively isolated course of English history, the national love of the via media in politics and religion, the recoil from either of the rival fanaticisms into which our continental neighbours have so often fallen—all these things, corrected by the cosmopolitanism which the growth of a vast Empire has brought with it, have helped to make the English people what they are, in a sense, to-day—the central people of the world. ”

“ By drawing all classes into a share in the life or the civilized State on the one hand, and drawing all races and countries into the orbit of civilization on the other, they have, at all events, given to the problem of reconstruction a universal statement, and provided us with the broadest foundations for the edifice which future generations will erect. The State is no longer the organ of a privileged few, still less of an intrusive alien element. The system of States is no longer merely European, but cosmopolitan ”

“ Indeed, it was only during the nineteenth century, after the storms of the French Revolution had awoke the peoples of Europe to a consciousness of their corporate existence, that the principle of nationality gained that complete ascendancy which has put an end for ever to the dream that one nation State can really absorb another or any essential portion of another. ”

“ Yet, again—and here India is the typical and crowning illustration—where no question of nationality was involved or could for ages arise, she has reduced to a condition of independence an immense population incapable of providing a civilized Government for itself; has established the reign of justice and order, which is the first condition of progress in civilization ”

“ This Empire, then, is obviously a middle term between the two other great Empire States that are its contemporaries, holding the balance between them, free alike from the exaggerated nationalism of the one and the exaggerated Imperialism of the other. It contains nations in the making, but it is not a nation in the making as a whole, for the welding of the manifold races within its bounds into a homogeneous nationality is as little probable in any time that we need consider as the assimilation of all the races of the world to one uniform type. ”

“ We are now, accordingly, in a better position to understand the meaning of the national ideal. With the progress of the long revolution it has gone on growing in power and depth and significance. Each step of enfranchisement has increased the facilities for the formation and expression of the national will, and given clearness and intensity to its volitions, till, in its modern form, the nation State is a moral and intellectual whole, whose unifying principle has something of the force of personality. ”

“ Yet at the very opposite pole of political development we have in India despotism organized by this same nation with an amplitude and, on the whole, an excellence such as the world has hardly seen before, and providing a shelter from anarchy for hundreds of millions of human beings to whom self-government would be an unthinkable absurdity. Then we have the two great self-governing federations of Canada and Australia, nation States second in possibilities of growth to the United States alone. ”