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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain, by 
+J. A. Cramb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
+       Nineteenth Century Europe
+
+Author: J. A. Cramb
+
+Release Date: December 19, 2009 [EBook #30710]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIGINS, DESTINY--IMPERIAL BRITAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: transliterated Greek is surrounded by plus signs,
+e.g. "+agôníai+".  Italicized text is surrounded by _underscores_.  In
+the phrase "_sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_", "[)a]" represents a-breve, "[=e]"
+represents e-macron.  "[oe]" represents the oe-ligature pair.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: J. A. Cramb]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ORIGINS AND DESTINY
+
+
+OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+
+
+BY THE LATE
+
+J. A. CRAMB, M.A.
+
+PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON
+
+
+
+
+WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+LONDON:
+
+JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+
+1915
+
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I determine and
+deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and force enough to draw
+the mindes both of young and olde to the diligent reading and digesting
+of these labours.  For what man is there so despising knowledge, or any
+so idle and slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what
+policies or by what kinde of government the most part of nations in the
+universall world were vanquished, subdued and made subject unto the one
+empire of the Romanes, which before that time was never seen or heard?
+Or who is there that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or
+studie, that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value or
+worthy to be esteemed before this?"
+
+_The Histories of the most famous Chronographer_, POLYBIUS.
+
+(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568).
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in
+May, June, and July, 1900.  Their immediate inspiration was the war in
+South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in
+these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the
+ideals and deeds of the present hour.  When the book first appeared,
+Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections
+by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might
+not be without service to his country."  In the same hope his lectures
+are now reprinted.
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May,
+1862.  On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he
+graduated in 1885, taking 1st Class Honours in Classics.  In the same
+year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature.  He
+also studied at Bonn University.  He subsequently travelled on the
+Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.
+Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son.  From 1888 to
+1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College,
+Glasgow.  Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to
+the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and also occasional reviews to
+periodicals.  For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service
+Commission.  In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of
+Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his
+death.  He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the
+Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres.  In
+London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.
+His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913,
+the subject being the relations between England and Germany.  In
+response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures
+for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+SECTION
+
+   WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+
+1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+
+2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+
+3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+
+1. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+
+2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+
+1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+
+2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+
+4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+
+5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+   THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+1. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+
+3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+
+4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+
+5. MILITARISM
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+   WHAT IS WAR?
+
+1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+
+2. DEFINITION OF WAR
+
+3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+
+4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+
+5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+
+6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+
+7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+   THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+
+1. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+
+2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+
+3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+
+4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+
+5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+   THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY
+
+4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+
+5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+
+6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE
+   MANDATE OF THE PRESENT
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+1. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+
+2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+
+3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+
+
+
+
+  REFLECTIONS ON THE
+  ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF
+  IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]
+
+The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
+impress on the traditions of humanity.  In no period has the burden of
+the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
+its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
+so monotonously.
+
+How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
+Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
+stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
+of a county, proceed to write the History of the World!  And in
+speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive
+incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
+he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
+possesses.  But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
+age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
+mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.
+
+This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
+which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
+mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
+endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
+results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
+caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
+the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
+all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
+things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
+with it silence and utter death.  The deepened significance of history
+springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
+our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
+present.  The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
+mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
+become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
+Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
+that invests them with this magic.  Life has become more
+self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
+the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
+
+World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
+with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
+Timeless manifesting itself in Time.  And the distinguishing function
+of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
+bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
+discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
+and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
+whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
+
+Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
+French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
+only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
+subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
+these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
+of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
+similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
+Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
+to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
+amongst the world-empires of the past.  I use the phrase "Imperial
+Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
+associations are inseparable.  It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
+the like.  But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
+spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
+has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
+material frame of empire.  With the rise of this spirit, this
+consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
+people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared.  The unity of
+Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
+achievement.  The aspirations of the period of the
+_Aufklärung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this
+edifice their political realization.  But the incident is not
+unprecedented.  Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
+obsolete.  It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
+under Louis XIV affected it.  But in this unobserved, this silent
+growth of Imperial Britain--so unobserved that it presents itself even
+now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the
+State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
+upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
+has few, if any, parallels in history.
+
+
+
+§ I.  THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+
+What is the nature of this Consciousness?  What is its historical
+basis?  Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
+
+In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
+individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
+purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious.  Life's end is then
+manifest.  The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
+becomes the fixed law of existence.  Such moments inevitably are
+difficult to localize.  Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
+Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind."  But it is
+neither Toulon, nor Vendémiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
+two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
+Napoleon to himself.  So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
+genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
+to France.  Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
+beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
+to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
+Thrasymene and Cannae.  It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
+the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
+The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
+line.  Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
+world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
+traces.  But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
+necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
+Unconscious to the Conscious.  Similarly in the England of the
+seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
+master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation.  This is
+the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
+the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
+"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
+lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers.  It is the unifying
+motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century.  The
+eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing.  An ideal
+from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
+eighteenth century.  But from the closing years of the century to the
+present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
+with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
+origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
+impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
+Britain.
+
+It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
+beginnings of great movements in history.  Nevertheless it is often
+convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
+or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
+itself.  And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
+constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
+I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
+patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
+hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
+further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
+speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
+select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
+Warren Hastings.  There this first awakening consciousness of an
+Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
+indeed.  Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
+of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow.  His conception of history
+at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
+school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus.  In religion he revered the
+traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time.  His
+literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
+Charles James Fox.  In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
+the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
+indifferent.  As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
+century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
+seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
+that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs.  But if
+his range was narrow, he is master there.  "Within that circle none
+durst walk but he."  No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
+rhetoric, a mightier language.  And if he is a reactionary in
+constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
+prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
+nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
+on violence, but on justice and freedom.  This ideal influences the
+action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
+its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
+from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke.  And in the
+seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
+hardly be traced at all.  In the speculative politics of that century
+we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
+part.  I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
+of Cromwell as "a great Briton."  Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
+neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
+in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
+sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
+Imperial Britain.  His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
+of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
+not consciously, not deliberately.
+
+In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
+influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
+than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
+us.  The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
+definitely, there lost in receding vistas.  On the battlefield or in
+the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
+is slowly elaborating itself.  And within the nation at large the ideal
+which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
+clearer consciousness.  Its influence throws a light upon the last
+speeches of the younger Pitt.  If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
+d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
+ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
+Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
+pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2]  The ideal makes
+great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
+Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent.  "The Cry of
+the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
+after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
+the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
+Nile.  The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
+strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
+battle-cry of the "Rights of Man."  Thus has this ideal, grown
+conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life.  It
+removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
+they by being free may bring freedom to others.  In the great
+renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
+name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus.  It imparts to modern
+politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
+at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
+
+Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
+constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
+in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
+the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
+possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
+at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
+his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+
+Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
+to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal
+which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
+surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
+Scotland, and of Ireland?  Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
+transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
+is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
+Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
+of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte.  This is the ideal, and in the
+resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
+its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
+as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
+of Imperial Britain.
+
+As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
+his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
+with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
+sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task.  This is
+the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
+races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
+Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome.  To spread
+the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
+Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon.  Similarly of
+Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
+in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan.  And in
+this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
+necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
+lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
+The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
+examine in a later lecture.
+
+Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
+in a clearer light.  Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
+British.  It is not Roman, not Hellenic.  The Roman ideal moulds every
+form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
+East, down to the eighteenth century.  The theory of the mediaeval
+empire derives immediately from Rome.  The Roman justice disguised as
+righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial.  The
+Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
+that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
+_Paradiso_.[3]  Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
+scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
+_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian.  The voluntary or
+accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
+which it popularized is worth considering.  It is false to the genius
+of Rome.  It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
+historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
+nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words.  _Imperium ac
+justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
+conceptions of Empire and Freedom.  The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
+Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
+Rome's name, deifying her genius.  But the ideal of Freedom, the
+freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
+highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
+statesman!  Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
+at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
+Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
+conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
+life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
+the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
+throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find.  The common
+traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
+of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
+arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
+unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
+of the ancient State.  And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
+effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
+the most original and varied forms.  The power of the Roman ideal, on
+the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
+seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
+itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France.  Consider how completely the
+ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
+closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
+Rome!
+
+The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
+is tedious as a twice-told tale.  Her art, her palaces, are her own
+eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
+waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
+multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
+sky.  But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
+inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
+grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
+
+Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
+proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
+because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
+that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
+life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
+But disaster taught Spain nothing--
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+  Alas, for mortal history!  In happy fortune
+  A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
+  A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
+  And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.
+
+
+The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
+comment than the decline of Spain.[4]
+
+The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
+of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
+bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
+Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
+before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
+
+And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
+procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
+Révolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
+
+From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
+first amongst modern empires, completely breaks.  For it is a new
+empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
+moulded by a new ideal.
+
+Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
+what each brings to the vanquished.
+
+Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
+army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
+That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
+legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
+behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
+Burgundy and Lorraine.  One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
+who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
+glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
+fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
+irresistible strength.  And to the Netherlands what does that army
+bring?  Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
+break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
+dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
+_auto-da-fé_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
+of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals.  These
+things accompany the march of Alva.  And that army of ours which day by
+day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
+does that army portend?  That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
+dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fé_; it brings with it, and not to one
+people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
+the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
+ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
+generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
+generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
+prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_élargissez Dieu!_"--to
+liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
+itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
+with the Divine.  And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
+coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
+consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
+designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
+pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
+whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
+some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
+issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
+and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
+conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
+this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
+the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
+for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
+humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
+distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
+has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
+
+
+
+§ 3.  THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+
+In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
+the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
+The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
+experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
+to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
+the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
+Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
+root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race.  The former
+nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
+end.  It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
+not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
+natural presence.  Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
+condition of man's being.  In the ancient world, government ever tends
+to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
+that State is imperial.  In the modern, government with concrete
+justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
+of the State whose ideal is higher.
+
+The vision of the _De Monarchia_--one God, one law, one creed, one
+emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in
+justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose
+imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur--does but
+describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon
+men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of
+Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of
+the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever
+eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual
+and melancholic.  Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into
+the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression
+in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"--"The State?  I am the State."  The
+ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme
+representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but
+from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the
+Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar."  That word
+thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God.
+It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the
+whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual.  Yet
+Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as
+strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries
+after that command was uttered.
+
+Such then is the character of the ideal.  And in the resolution as a
+people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer
+all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of
+Imperial Britain.  None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen
+within the consciousness of a people.  And to England through all her
+territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now.  If ever
+there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the
+twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of
+its fate, it is NOW!  There is an Arab fable of the white steed of
+Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to
+every man, as to every people, comes _once_.  Glory to that man, to
+that race, who dares to mount it!  And that steed, is it not nearing
+England now?  Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on
+the blast!
+
+Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great
+resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented
+themselves to men and to nations.  Even now they present themselves,
+manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to
+humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion
+of other States.  But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it
+alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every
+imperial race that History knows.  How shall any empire, any state,
+conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the
+individual--"In honour preferring one another"?  This in an imperial
+State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
+
+But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to
+swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered.  That
+pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony
+of Magersfontein.  For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month
+that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial
+Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South
+Africa.  If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all
+the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
+carry with it its own refutation.  There is a kind of tragic elevation
+in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
+Timour.  But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
+Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
+the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
+design thus base, ambition thus sordid?  And if we call to memory the
+dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
+us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
+traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
+dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus?  And in what cause have we died?"
+were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
+world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
+is for the mines, it is for the mines!"  No man can believe that; no
+man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night!  The
+imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck.  Great enterprises have
+ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
+seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities.  But to
+arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
+baser alloy?  To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
+long approved?  Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.
+
+Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
+ideal--an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
+their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
+path of England now.  For this these men have died, from the first
+battle of the war to that fought yesterday.  And it is this knowledge,
+this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
+compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
+They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
+past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future.  They
+have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
+impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
+account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises!  But yesterday
+in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
+seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down
+upon the place of their rest.  For this ideal they have died--"in their
+youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
+spring from the year."
+
+Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
+greet the great dead who fell in the old wars!  See, through the mists
+of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
+from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
+greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
+from their wounds!  Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
+disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
+at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
+have sent thither as the _avant-garde_ of our faith, that in this cause
+is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.
+
+
+
+[1] The Latin work of Osorius, _De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
+Lusitaniae_, appeared in 1574, two years later than _Os Lusiadas_.  The
+twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
+1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens.  But the
+hero of Osorius is Alboquerque.  His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
+literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
+of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
+with his eyes upon his subject.  Seven years after the Latin, a French
+translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
+published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
+others, bringing the history down to 1529.
+
+[2] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
+April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
+Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
+afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
+Tuesday morning (April 3rd).  The close of the speech is thus reported:
+"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
+the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
+reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
+regret.  We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
+calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
+commerce.  We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
+in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
+blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure
+religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of
+that immense continent.  Then may we hope that even Africa, though last
+of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening
+of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon
+us in a much earlier period of the world.  Then also will Europe,
+participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample
+recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no
+longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the
+darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more
+speedily dispelled--
+
+  Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis,
+  illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.
+
+Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used
+with a different view--
+
+  His demum exactis--
+  devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
+  fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas;
+  largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit
+  purpureo."
+
+Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment
+remains, was delivered on April 27th (_Parl. Hist._ xxix, pp. 1134-88).
+
+[3] Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history
+of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the
+centuries which follow.  To Dante he represents at once the subtleties
+of Jurisprudence and Theology.  The Eagle's hymn in the _Paradiso_
+(Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and
+Mediaeval Imperialism.  The essence of the entire treatise _De
+Monarchia_ is in these cantos; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person
+speaks, is informed by the same spirit.
+
+[4] Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a
+further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of
+Spain.  Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single
+life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an
+empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in
+fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject
+State.  Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel,
+John III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe.
+But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry
+went hand in hand.  To the pride of her conquistadores was added the
+fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within
+the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
+administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
+incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa.  The
+resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
+the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
+certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
+themselves upon the mind.  And these distinctions mark the divergence
+between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
+designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
+Britain.  Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
+Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
+Dante.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 15_th_, 1900]
+
+Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
+move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
+the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
+Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
+The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
+transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
+To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
+has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
+hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
+preliminary study.  Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
+but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
+instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
+generations.  But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
+a contemporary of the remotest ages.  The beam of light, however far
+into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
+sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
+whence he came.  As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
+Divine grows more, not less insistent.  Each moment indeed is rooted in
+the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
+comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
+memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
+itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
+Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
+sovereignty, as the eye is unmoved at the narrow bounds that hedge its
+vision, and finds peace where he would otherwise have found but despair.
+
+Those affinities, those intimate relations of the past and present, are
+the basis of speculative politics.  A judgment upon a movement in the
+present, an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, a nation, or
+an empire will describe in the future, is of little value unless from a
+wide enough survey the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its
+support.
+
+Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated above we have the ideal
+of a race destined to Empire, and at last across the centuries grown
+conscious of that destiny, the question confronts us--is it possible
+out of the past, not surveying it from the vantage-ground of the
+present merely, but as it were living into the present from the past,
+to foreshadow the rise of this consciousness?  Or turning back in the
+light of this consciousness to the past, is there offered by the past a
+justification of this interpretation of the present, of this movement
+styled "Imperialism"?
+
+The heart of the matter lies in the transformation of mediaeval
+patriotism into modern imperialism, in the evolution or development
+which out of the Englishman of the earlier centuries has produced the
+Englishman of the present, moved by other and higher political ends.
+Is there any incident or series of incidents in our history, of
+magnitude enough profoundly to affect the national consciousness, to
+which we may look for the causes, or for the formative spirit, of this
+change?  And in their effect upon the national consciousness of Britain
+have these incidents followed any law traceable in other nations or
+empires?
+
+
+
+§ I.  OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+
+There is a kind of criticism directed against politics which, year by
+year or month by month, makes the discovery that between the code which
+regulates the action of States and the code which regulates the actions
+of individuals divergencies or contradictions are constantly arising.
+War violates the ordinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of
+truth; expediency, those of justice.  And the conclusion is drawn that
+whatever be the softening influences of civilization upon the relations
+of private life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, brutally
+aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns undisturbed.  Era succeeds
+era, faiths rise and set, statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs,
+act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
+their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
+the centuries.  And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
+"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
+Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
+self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.
+
+Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
+each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
+whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
+individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
+actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
+the actions of individuals.  And he therefore is the greatest statesman
+who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
+to the individual--whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
+adventure!  The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
+the self-communings of Mazzini.
+
+Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
+acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
+applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
+the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals.  The unity
+of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
+distinct from the unity of those parts.  Even in chemistry the laws
+which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
+constituent atoms.  And in that highest and most complex of all
+unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
+another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
+more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
+unities which compose it.  In the region in which States act and
+interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
+Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
+at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals.  The orbit
+described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
+the orbit of the separate life.  The life which the individual
+surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
+return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
+conditions.
+
+These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
+between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
+but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
+suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
+by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
+of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
+something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our
+knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
+other.
+
+The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
+been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
+distinction, between the two codes.  Every principle of Machiavelli is
+implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
+supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
+reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
+or an Oxenstiern.[1]  The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is
+irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or
+the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
+a disaster without a parallel.  What Sulla felt as a first, most living
+impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment.  It is
+thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
+_jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously
+interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and
+the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
+profoundest of modern thinkers.  M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
+in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
+_Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
+the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as
+if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
+inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
+of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
+history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.
+
+To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
+enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
+spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
+History, are not identical with the laws of individual life.  The
+region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is
+possible to obtain some perception, or _Ahnung_ as a German would say,
+of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly
+upon the problem before us.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history
+of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the
+present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence,
+not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic
+Tragedy.  The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the
+soul by Compassion and by Terror--+di eléou kaì phóbou kátharsis+.[3]
+Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the
+definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present
+inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted
+above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of
+fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante--
+
+  Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,
+  Che la vostra miseria non mi tange
+  Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[4]
+
+
+In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision,
+discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues
+unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself.
+Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind,
+and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness
+of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their
+very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the
+loftiest that can engage the human intellect.
+
+Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a
+heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an
+Agamemnon or a Theseus.  Hence, though traceable in all, the operation
+of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the
+history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing
+dimensions.  Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more
+impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens--most poignantly
+perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of
+Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage,
+the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there
+came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced,
+started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread
+certainty of ruin.  That hour was but the essential agony of a
+soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
+of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
+Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.  In the
+writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
+pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
+Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured
+cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some
+higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
+power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
+Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal.  The serious admiration of
+Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
+appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
+not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
+Kleon or of Kritias.  History never again beheld such a band of
+pamphleteers![6]
+
+In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
+similar moment occurs.  After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
+but rises a new city.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
+than the Rome of the Decemvirs.  It is not the inevitable change which
+centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
+Rome's life as a State.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
+Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.
+
+So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
+eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
+to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
+imaginative justice of its sway.
+
+In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
+life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
+agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
+consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
+life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century.  After the
+short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
+humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity.  The empire
+purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
+chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
+turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
+The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign
+defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury,
+with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest
+of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the
+desperate lists at Bosworth.
+
+This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political
+historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret
+sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered
+by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned
+out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day.
+
+In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming
+power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a
+very complete manner.  It reveals itself, for instance, in two
+different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be
+dealt with separately.  In the first of these aspects, deeply and
+permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen
+is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy
+appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic
+transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene
+and dauntless courage.  This influence now makes itself felt in English
+politics, in English religion, in English civic life.
+
+If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at
+first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for
+empire.  Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not
+in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any
+sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks
+the imperial character of Persia and of Rome.  England seems fated to
+add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant
+States, illustrating the theme--+húbris phyteúei tyrannón+--"insolence
+begets the tyrant!"  Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns
+from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the
+earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from
+the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith.  And now in the
+days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to
+nothing.  Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow;
+but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais
+will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph.  It was not merely
+the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
+instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
+empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.
+
+But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
+change is now apparent.  As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
+Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
+from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
+arises a new nation.  This declares itself in the altered course of her
+policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland.  In Ireland, for
+instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
+bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
+the Pale.  Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king.  In
+politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I.  He
+abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
+he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
+reverting to the Plantagenet policy.  He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
+but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
+not defeated at all.  King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
+around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
+"companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning.  But
+the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
+recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
+these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
+and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
+deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
+The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
+nationality, cement the union.
+
+In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
+causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
+sink from sight altogether.  As in geology the century is useless as a
+unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
+astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
+spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
+conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
+generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
+The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
+future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
+Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
+that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
+a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
+Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
+the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
+could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
+rather than weakened the energy of her resolve.  Had England fallen in
+the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
+than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
+claim to original or creative Imperialism.  But if she were to perish
+now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
+the recorded annals of man.
+
+Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
+from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania.  And in Islam four
+generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
+displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
+
+In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
+its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
+generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
+unquestionable.  The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
+century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
+bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
+the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
+Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France.  The national
+consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
+its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
+influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
+affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
+England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
+memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
+and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
+strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
+sounds.  Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
+East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
+How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
+race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its
+own life by the contact with this manifold environment?  He who might
+have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
+presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
+influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
+sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
+ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
+the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
+range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
+
+
+
+§ 3.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+
+The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
+history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
+moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
+exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
+serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
+law of its being.  There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
+the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
+the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
+Thermopylae, the +enérgeia tês psychês+--the energy of the soul.  This
+energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertù_ of Machiavelli, the
+spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
+It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
+nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
+insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition.  It is the heroism which
+adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
+daring.
+
+In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
+centuries that immediately succeed Cannae.  Nothing in history is more
+worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
+history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
+Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
+
+Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
+place with the greatest political historians for all time.  It was his
+work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
+the supreme guide in political history.  Polybius has every inducement
+to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
+His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
+Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
+Kosciusko of the old world.  Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
+representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
+study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
+their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
+intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
+there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
+Hellas merely, but of the whole earth.  The message of his history,
+composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
+is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
+wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
+domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
+eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message.  The
+Romano-Hellenic empire is born.  Other men arise both to the east and
+to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
+fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
+Polybius was the first to express immortally.  It inspires the rhetoric
+of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--
+
+  Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
+  credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
+  orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
+  describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
+  tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
+  hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
+  parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
+
+
+The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
+"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
+incredible.  It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
+Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
+Claudian.  And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
+Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields
+such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
+Hapsburg and Bourbon.  Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
+uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
+itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
+flicker in the eighteenth century.
+
+Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
+does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
+itself?  Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
+contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's
+title-deeds of empire.
+
+Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
+myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
+wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
+England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
+humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
+Scotland, greater than before her defeat.  This energy of the soul,
+quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
+struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
+England.
+
+The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
+fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
+lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners.  But it has been transformed,
+and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
+enterprise.  These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
+the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
+kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
+false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
+of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
+way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.
+
+As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
+nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
+this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
+memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
+Marlowe and his elder contemporaries.  Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems
+to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_,
+that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
+some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
+emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible.  In Martin Frobisher,
+for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
+us the England of the first years of Elizabeth!  Frobisher in early
+manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
+blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
+Genovese Columbus to discover America!"  That task was clearly
+England's!  "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
+sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
+northwest passage to Cathay.  Upon this he spends the pith of his
+manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
+sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
+"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
+forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
+suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
+Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable.  In the northern
+latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_
+gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
+Christ His Sonne."
+
+The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy
+of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
+times.  And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
+energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
+the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
+laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
+Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.
+
+In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
+only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
+ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
+justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
+times.  If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
+implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
+systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs.  Eliot, for instance, in the
+work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its
+thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
+ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal.  We
+encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
+Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
+language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
+In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
+the steadfastness of the action.  And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
+from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
+Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
+imperfectly developed.  The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
+upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
+equally sublime, and more catholic and humane.  Whatever its immediate
+influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts
+it was all-powerful.  The very vividness with which they conceive the
+ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high
+purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of
+Selden, and of Falkland.  The perfect State, the scope of its laws,
+government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads
+thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at
+other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of
+adverse interests.  From the remote nature of their quest arises much
+of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era.  The
+parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from
+the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on
+is the star of England's destiny.
+
+Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of
+being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal
+to statesmanship.  But the advent of that age was marked by so much
+that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic
+policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two
+nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring
+creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply
+religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those
+times.  But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift
+glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of
+the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious
+to the suspicion of theory.  The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony
+with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him
+to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending,
+often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could
+command.  And yet his career is a presage of the future.  Toleration in
+religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas
+corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much
+distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation.  And
+there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward
+Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were
+to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters.  But the year of _Mare
+Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months
+of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]
+
+But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
+revolutionists.  Revolution is the child of speculation.  The men of
+the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics.  Their mark is a
+wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
+wondrous than that of Aeëtes.  But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
+the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
+the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
+Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
+though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
+last parted fatally from his companions.  Practical does not always
+mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
+to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the
+destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
+practical politicians.  In their lives, in the shaping of their
+careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
+of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
+gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
+pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
+that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
+forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
+_Samson Agonistes_--
+
+  O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
+  Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
+  Without all hope of day.
+
+But not in vain.  The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
+these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
+completed the journey which they began.
+
+We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
+empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_,
+written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
+moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
+all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Télémaque_.  It meets us
+in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
+bears about it the air of a martyr's cell.  We find it again explicitly
+in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
+Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
+last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
+moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
+mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt.  It burns
+in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
+great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
+the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
+Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
+Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
+Stuart Mill.
+
+The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
+century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
+1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
+the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
+an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
+centuries we have indicated.  The leaders in this revolution, men like
+Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
+began.  They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
+else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people
+disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
+other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
+of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
+twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
+undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations
+whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
+before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?
+
+This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
+is this.  Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
+distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has
+arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
+former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
+the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream.  Thus it has
+arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
+the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
+magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
+ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
+itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
+chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
+and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
+returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
+hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm,
+the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later
+centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned,
+far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning
+voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!
+This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.
+For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural
+design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately
+or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer
+purposes and to nobler ends.
+
+
+
+[1] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic
+reflection is simply Machiavelism.
+
+[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum
+commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in
+existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments
+which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss.  Of
+Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of
+Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so
+much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England,
+or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily.  Sulla's remark on the
+young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as
+Richelieu's on Condé or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.
+
+[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the
+continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator
+in the tragedy.  The transforming power is thus more intimate and
+profound.
+
+[4] "God in His mercy such created me
+    "That misery of yours attains me not,
+    "Nor any flame assails me of this burning."
+
+[5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between
+the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the
+singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice
+by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of
+the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases
+as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand."  "Man when
+perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated
+from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all."
+"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the
+destruction of a City."  The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later
+date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct
+from that which characterizes his earlier works.  The shading-in of the
+life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it
+were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to
+the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears
+as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon
+Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato,
+Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to
+imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.
+
+[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had
+before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted
+the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh.  Even their most
+speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered
+attainable by Hellas, or by Athens.  The disappearance of Socrates from
+the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of
+Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a
+concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since
+Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to
+the common life of Athens and of Hellas.  So in the England of the
+seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of
+Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical
+in their aims.  Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of
+Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord
+and its ills.  This was in 1628--fatal date!
+
+[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the
+English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell,
+Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king.  "It
+rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757.  Pitt
+was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the
+merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king,
+which led to his return to office in June.  The events of the period of
+four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the
+House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere
+enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents,
+characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756,
+Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national
+militia organized.  1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and
+conquest of Bengal.  1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg,
+three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November
+25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree.  1759,
+"year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st,
+capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the
+flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August
+19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd,
+POCOCK defeats D'Aché; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt;
+September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada;
+November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me
+alongside the French Admiral."  1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats
+Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic.  1761, January 16th, English
+enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June
+7th; October 5th, PITT resigns.  It is doubtful whether, since the
+eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European
+stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and
+the king of Prussia.
+
+[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in
+the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the
+wider in his intellectual range.  Worlds were open to his glance beyond
+the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens.  Yet Camoens is a
+heroic figure.  He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but
+to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires,
+hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen,
+thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that
+betrayed the hero.
+
+[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship;
+yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes,
+hopes of this time.  In one sentence nineteen religions are named as
+co-existing in Scotland.
+
+[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare
+Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in
+1610.  Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304
+pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for
+England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy
+over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern
+waters, and Venice over the Adriatic.  The King's enthusiasm was
+kindled.  The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State
+paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy,
+the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible
+rights of England.  Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the
+Exchequer and at the Admiralty.  A fleet was equipped, and as an
+atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King
+gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the
+noblest of Vandyck's canvases.  But Northumberland, though brave to a
+fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in
+ridicule.  Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation.  But
+in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left
+him.  To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's
+refusal.  The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to
+Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded
+events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's
+greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded
+by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold
+resolution.
+
+  Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
+  Living or dying.
+
+
+After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart
+still beat.  An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the
+time of Cromwell.  The translator was Marchamont Nedham.  The
+dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of
+the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
+
+[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October
+1st, 1801.  Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's
+speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of
+the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the
+wedding-feast of Claudius.  In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt
+declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of
+Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should
+have the benefit of the colony without its expenses.  Nelson, with the
+glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that
+in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but
+now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere
+tavern that served to delay the voyage.  The opening of Windham's
+speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all,
+France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ xxxvi, pp. 1-191).
+Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had
+passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to
+France.  Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments,
+but once understood by England there was no faltering.  Prussia,
+Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or
+alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
+England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Hélène.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]
+
+In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the
+development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself
+that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions
+of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or
+dominion.  For such a study the materials are only in appearance less
+satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race.  It
+is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the
+Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that
+drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of
+performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of
+them impossible.  The reflection might be extended to other political
+revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde.  Ranke's
+indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as
+in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object
+than the impression of an impression.  No State papers, no documents,
+the most authentic, can take us further.
+
+But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet
+for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age
+discovers itself.  Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of
+thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.
+It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's
+resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the
+prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the
+records of politics.
+
+
+
+§ 1.  RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+
+Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the
+development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the
+same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of
+the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which
+manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent.  The persecuting
+intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
+passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism
+or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of
+the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the
+creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists
+themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent
+or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all
+times.  The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier
+ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before
+Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its
+own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions,
+once hostile to its own.  By slow degrees England has arisen, first to
+the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of
+the truth in other faiths.  In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying
+races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the
+effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in
+Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in
+all ages, been the stamp of imperial races.  Upon the character of the
+race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the
+question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be
+exalted or debased.
+
+As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the
+tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must
+turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life
+of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain
+of to-day.  The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had
+no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of
+England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of
+Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs.  The Reformation in
+England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart
+from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in
+England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's
+consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have
+spoken at some length already.  But for the remoter origins and causes
+of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search
+not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race
+itself.  The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any
+more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs
+from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness
+with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions
+of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the
+"Whither?" of human life.  And it is the seriousness with which England
+regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it
+the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its
+sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
+swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the
+capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties.  Rome never
+endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher
+vision.  When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying.  Alaric and
+the fifth century have come.  For Rome the drama of a thousand years is
+ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly,
+tragically.  Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly?  Over
+a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on
+the still brow the secret of his own destiny.
+
+In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in
+Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion
+of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of
+flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no
+deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the
+Persian sway can be discovered.  Islam starts with religious
+aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her
+ideals dies with Ali.  At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system
+warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a
+theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their
+political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often
+ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
+
+Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the
+distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of
+its history?  Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say,
+from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
+conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the
+present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
+conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
+an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
+Divine.  From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
+arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
+justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
+freedom.
+
+Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
+between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
+far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
+found anywhere else in Europe.  Glance, for instance, at this struggle
+in Germany.  Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
+gods against Christianity.  Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
+down amongst the Saxons.  His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
+of Constantine against Rome.  Witikind does rise to the heights of
+heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
+in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror.  Mercia, the
+kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
+gods against the religion of Christ--Penda.  There is no surrender
+here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
+himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
+An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
+last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism!  He
+lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on.  There you have the spirit of
+the race.  It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
+well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
+
+King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
+mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
+death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
+seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
+with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
+sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
+little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
+darkness.  Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
+goeth we know not."  "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first
+translator, ends the passage.  Who does not see--notwithstanding the
+difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance--who
+does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the
+solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but
+which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone--+adêlon pantì
+plén é tô theô+"?
+
+Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England
+between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted.  There in the
+seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and
+the insight which appear in other forms in after ages.  The roll of
+English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the
+sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the
+death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal
+mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee
+transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship.  The Saintly
+Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was
+given but to pray for death.  Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that
+all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and
+splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from
+a city buried deep beneath the ocean.  Instead of defiance, Rome taught
+them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the
+worship of delight, the worship of sorrow.  In this faith the Saxon and
+the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live.  But the old faith
+died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle
+Age.  Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the
+war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of
+Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics.  Yet what a contrast is
+the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard
+Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
+
+Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to
+the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings.  They are
+not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the
+wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and
+of the Northern Myths.  England as we know it is not yet formed.
+Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English
+freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned
+the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
+Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric.  To the
+religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
+bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious.  The struggle
+against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
+foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
+same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
+fourteenth century.  In the light of the future, the struggle of the
+ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
+the Heptarchic kings.  To this land of England the Vikings have the
+right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of
+supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution
+to die for that will, confers.
+
+
+
+§ 3.  DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+
+The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
+Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
+like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy.  Religion is
+the philosophy of the warrior.  And the scanty records of the Vikings,
+the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
+the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
+deeply than the thoughts of the dastard.  The Normans, who close the
+English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of
+England, illustrate this conspicuously.  If the sombre fury of the
+Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
+vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
+earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
+religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested.  Europe
+of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
+each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
+Conqueror.  In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
+has few parallels in history.  He is the founder of the Mediaeval
+Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
+State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
+Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
+execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
+astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
+fail.  One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman
+genius made upon him.  It was to transform this race, the tyrants of
+the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean
+and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the
+theocratic State whose centre was Rome.  But the vastness of his
+original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose
+with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by
+Buonarroti or Tintoretto.  Yet no ruler of men had a profounder
+knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had
+rendered him peculiarly familiar.  The judgment of Orderic and of
+William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand.  But the
+Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised
+from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly
+muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our
+race.
+
+There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire,
+Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English
+historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the
+descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory
+of France.  The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the
+attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious
+study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of
+Pitt!  How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the
+Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation
+at Westminster?  Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the
+Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.
+To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which
+the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit
+they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.
+But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less
+assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen:
+to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest,
+representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars.  Nature and her
+affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither
+for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had
+preceded them.  They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute
+and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the
+most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more
+richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon,
+Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan.  And who shall affirm from what
+branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals
+sprang?
+
+Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last
+struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those
+various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred
+years make England, and who in their religious and political character
+lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
+
+Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their
+contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of
+battle and the Norman love of God.  Upon these two ideas the history of
+the Middle Age turns.  The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the
+priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar
+and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence.  Chivalry is born.
+The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in
+Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men.  From the grave of
+his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the
+beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante
+rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even
+that age has carved in stone.
+
+Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of
+Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters
+greatly.  In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty rôle
+which the future centuries reserve for her is portended.  The immortal
+energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in
+the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's
+desire.  We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the
+Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great
+tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more
+continuous, was not more earnest.  How singular is the chance, if it be
+chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda,
+and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart!  Upon the
+shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring
+sway.  The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory
+of Richard is there imperishably.  Richard's services to England are
+not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a
+king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
+parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
+poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
+name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
+announcing the England of the years to come.
+
+
+
+§ 4.  WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+
+The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
+age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
+constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
+The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
+for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen.  In the steady
+development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
+the unwritten history of the English Reformation.  The race resolves no
+more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
+truth.
+
+Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
+In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
+Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
+last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
+appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII.  The
+statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for
+Wyclif.  The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs.  How
+shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Creçy and on other
+fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
+
+The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
+of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
+determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries.  In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
+presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
+their transforming power to spiritual life.  As in political life the
+sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
+sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
+consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
+vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
+others.  For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
+to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
+only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom
+and by faith.
+
+The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a
+Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy--swept the
+Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
+herself had sought them.  This is the impulse which binds the whole
+English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
+from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle.  It is
+this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
+because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
+absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
+
+The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
+conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
+set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
+
+This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
+Reformation.  It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
+Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
+English historian has drawn his own Cromwell.  But to foreign
+historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal.  Dr.
+Döllinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
+study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
+vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by
+his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
+the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2]  This is the deliberate
+judgment of Döllinger.  It was the judgment of the peasants of the
+Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago!  Somewhat the same impression
+was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
+
+Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in
+the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole
+conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its
+idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
+same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
+We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke.  It is the essential
+thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes.  It is supremely and beautifully
+expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
+of tolerance.
+
+And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney?  One who knew him well,
+though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
+kind of divine philosophy of the mind."  Community of religious not
+less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
+Shaftesbury.  In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
+they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau.  In the
+_Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon
+which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
+State.  The Record Office has no more precious document than the
+draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
+handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
+statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
+of his own or any age.  One suggested formula after another is
+traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
+citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
+or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God."  Algernon
+Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
+their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
+of Locke and Shaftesbury.
+
+Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
+analogous to their position in politics, already delineated.  In
+politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
+and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future.  In religion
+they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
+centuries develop and apply.  Both in politics and in religion they
+turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
+consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
+Imperialism of to-day.
+
+If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
+roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
+civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
+intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
+found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
+eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
+religious.  England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
+the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the
+home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
+asylum of Voltaire.[5]  Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
+the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
+as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined.  The one is
+the organic inevitable growth of the other.  The England which fought
+at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
+Marston Moor and Dunbar.  Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
+than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
+parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
+Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
+earnestly reverent, when rightly studied.  Even its scepticism, its
+fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a
+Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long
+afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
+ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
+utter death.  And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
+outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
+constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
+comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
+great period of the _Aufklärung_ in Germany.  Kant acknowledged his
+indebtedness to Hume.  Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
+in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
+
+Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
+_Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
+victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
+of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
+ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
+Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
+to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
+palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
+scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills.  An epic in prose--and every
+one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
+sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
+of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
+superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
+
+David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or
+England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of
+England_.  It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
+There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
+forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance.  This is not to be
+regretted.  Hume's _History of England_ is one of these books.  For
+nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English
+men and women read.  It was impossible that a man like Hume, the
+central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke,
+Shaftesbury, Gibbon--the desire for a larger freedom for man's
+thought--it was impossible for him to write without saturating every
+page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations
+could read that _History_ without being insensibly, unconsciously
+transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by
+contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
+
+Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears
+fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
+the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards
+the peoples of India, towards Islam.  Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the
+foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching
+of Mohammedanism under the Queen.  It was not only Lord Kitchener who
+built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
+
+The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead
+in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the
+analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth
+century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent
+national or feudal England.  Erigena in the ninth century surveying all
+things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison
+"through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains
+it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by
+England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest
+aspirations, the very heart of the race.  The greatest empire in the
+annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most
+tolerant.  Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her
+glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons
+of time.
+
+Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this
+transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only
+from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the
+influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the
+Oriental peoples she conquers.  The work of the Arabists of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8]
+father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
+Locke and of Hume.  The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of
+Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to
+bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to
+converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present
+century--_The Sacred Books of the East_.
+
+Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion
+and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations
+towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice,
+summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with
+the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar
+of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in
+religious life or in political life or in any other form of life.  For
+all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly
+transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of
+Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually
+between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
+
+
+
+§ 5.  THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+
+Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past,
+there is one more question to consider, though with brevity.  The great
+empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia,
+Islam, represent each a distinct ideal--in each a separate aspect of
+the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems
+incarnate.  In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +tò kalón+; in Rome,
+it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples,
+half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her
+kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that
+mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her
+architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy.  Other
+races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery;
+but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the
+sections of the race.
+
+What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this
+Empire of Britain represent?  Apart altogether from its individual
+ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race,
+distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the
+Persian, does it eminently possess?
+
+Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the
+beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the
+beginnings of Rome.  Who founded the Roman State?  There is one fact
+about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient,
+that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from
+every city, district, region, in Italy.  The outlaw, the refugee from
+justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless
+man--these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the
+Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced
+marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in.  This process
+may have extended over a century--over two centuries; Rome drawing to
+itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in
+fortune as the first.  Who are the founders of England, of Imperial
+Britain?  They are those "co-seekers," _conqu[oe]stores_, I have spoken
+of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to
+say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless--the fittest men
+of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but
+for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth
+and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws
+to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with,
+Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and
+followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I.  They
+come in "hundreds," they come in thousands.  Into England, as into some
+vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred
+years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and
+undivided, the English Nation.  Such was the foundation, such the
+building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its
+first beginnings this land can show.
+
+And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic
+kindred, the testimony is not less sure.  What a heaven of light falls
+upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not
+begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey--works that sum up
+an old civilization!  Already is born that beauty which, whether in
+religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever.  And it
+is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and
+of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills.  The
+infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated
+on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its
+first appearance in history.  But of England and the Teutonic race what
+shall one say?  A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
+extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
+the political, and social conditions of life.  Freedom and deathless
+courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
+accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
+touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
+Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages.  In
+the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
+upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
+Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race.  In the Faust
+legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
+attains a supreme embodiment.  In the Oriental imagination the sense of
+the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
+and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
+apathy or despair.  But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
+from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
+rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
+
+This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
+and Teutonic literature, and even in action.  The spirit which
+originates the _Völker-wanderung_, for instance, reappears in the
+half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
+the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
+the crusades.  They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
+was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
+where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
+whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
+by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
+
+Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
+this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
+Teutonic race.
+
+And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
+attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
+dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
+epochs.  It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
+infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
+devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the
+common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls
+like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth
+and ninth centuries.  It adds the glamour as from a distant and
+enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the
+pilgrim's high endeavour.  It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners
+and made the ocean their inheritance.  In later times it reappears as
+the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate,
+yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its
+environment.
+
+If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first
+founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the
+founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the
+Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude,
+already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the
+coming harmonies, of _Faustus_ and _Lear_, of _Hamlet_ and _Adonais_.
+
+
+
+[1] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.
+Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something
+of the spirit of Arminius, _etwas vom Geiste Armins_ (_D.K.I._, p.
+112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of
+Waitz (_Verfassungsgeschichte_, iii, p. 120).  Yet the form Widu-kind
+is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the
+name.
+
+[2] Döllinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable--"Aber er
+(_i.e._, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Mächtigen, ein religiöses
+Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht,
+welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen
+den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich
+trug:--das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles
+religiösen Zwanges."  Proceeding to expand this idea, Döllinger again
+describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the
+inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern
+world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der
+Beherrscher eines mächtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkündete, die
+dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der
+öffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer
+zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen müssen.  Die Evangelische Union,
+welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein früher unbekanntes und für
+unmöglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen
+glücklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und
+vorbereitenden Gründer betrachten."--_Akademische Vorträge_, 1891, vol.
+iii, pp. 55, 56.
+
+[3] The _Argenis_ was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on
+religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its
+pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even
+of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put
+in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice
+and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to
+Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria.  In the
+motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and
+requires no other.  The _Argenis_, unfortunately for English
+literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the
+vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
+
+[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface
+to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had
+already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).
+"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the
+principal occasion of our miseries and confusions.  But whatever has
+been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure.  We
+have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of
+in our distemper.  It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts
+of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst
+us, that can do the work.  The first will but palliate, the second
+increase our evil.  Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and
+impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of."  The second
+Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May
+27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human
+Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most
+eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th,
+1693.
+
+[5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when
+mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"
+an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires
+of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of
+Bolingbroke and Newton.  A hundred phrases could be gathered from his
+correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds
+serious or extravagant utterance.  Even in the last decades of his
+life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to
+Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the
+Romans, and the English"; and to Helvétius, about the same period
+(1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the
+adventurous thought of England.  He even forces Frederick the Great
+into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you
+are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we
+Germans, we have caution."
+
+[6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the
+_Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V.,
+_i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide
+scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals
+the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression
+of the world-sorrow.  Several of the more violent pamphlets on
+religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity.  He died
+in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.
+
+[7] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto
+of his _History of England_ must be measured by the standard of the
+hopes he had formed.  Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he
+had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle
+unacknowledged.  But the appearance of his _History_, two years later
+than his _Political Discourses_, was synchronous with the darkest hours
+in English annals since 1667.  An English fleet had to quit the Channel
+before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated
+at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost.  At this period the tide of
+ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.
+The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment
+deep-seated and strong.  London had not yet forgotten the panic which
+the march of the Pretender had roused.  To the Scottish nation the
+massacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge--savage, pre-meditated,
+and impolitic.  The ministry of Chatham changed all this.  He raised an
+army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of
+England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families,
+bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but
+frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred
+in the ranks of English merchants.  Hume's work was thus caught in the
+stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
+was reflected upon its historian.  The general verdict was ratified by
+the concord of the best judgments.  Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
+faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
+Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the _Annual
+Register_.  Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
+the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
+epithet.  The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
+for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study.  Nor
+did its power diminish.  It contained the best writing, the deepest
+thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
+over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.
+
+[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
+ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers.  Spinoza, for
+instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
+and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]
+
+Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth
+across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now
+control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher
+conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,
+and towards the State.  To-day a subject of more pressing interest
+confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and
+sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,
+arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears
+which compose the instant of man's life.  We are in the thick of the
+deed--how are we to judge it?  How conjure the phantoms inimical to
+truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate
+the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?
+
+Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this
+aspect I propose to direct your attention.  The separate incidents of
+the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,
+politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom
+or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the
+resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,
+alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous
+surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not
+this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries
+hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired
+to see or imagined they saw.
+
+But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the
+purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's
+sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it
+is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_.  What is its
+historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the
+presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?
+
+
+
+§ I.  THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative
+or absolute, of the opposing forces.  Fewer men fell at Salamis than at
+Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not
+exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the
+world.  The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with
+the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of
+the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy.  War is the supreme act in the
+life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is
+pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.
+It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever
+glorious, or swiftly forgotten.  What, then, are the principles at
+issue in the present war?
+
+The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first
+event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies
+in this force named Imperialism.  It is the first conspicuous
+expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action,
+which now as always implies heroic suffering.  No other war in our
+history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so
+exclusively the result of this imperial ideal.  Whatever may have been
+the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the
+motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal
+by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has
+been prescribed and controlled.  But the present war is not merely a
+war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.
+Thiers' refrain, _digue de l'attention des hommes_; but, like the wars
+of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war
+between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the
+life-history of modern States.
+
+In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom
+was arrayed against the principle of authority.  The conflict rolled
+hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour
+and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur,
+sublime devotion, or moving pity.  So in the war of the French
+Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the
+principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the
+combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia,
+Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most
+precious memories of mankind.
+
+In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is
+between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted.  But
+in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the
+conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often
+equally lofty, equally impressive.
+
+Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic
+in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the
+sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.
+There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at
+strife--the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which,
+for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.
+These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile
+veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose _dénouement_--who dare
+foretell?  What distant generation shall behold _that_ curtain?
+
+
+
+§ 2.  NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+
+In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as
+in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now
+name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting.  The empire which
+has ceased to advance has begun to recede.  Motion is the law of its
+being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death.  Thus in a
+race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is,
+Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of
+evolution it attains.  The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State
+passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or
+swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature.  No
+great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age.  The
+patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the
+actualized ideal of his time.  Eliot in the seventeenth century died
+for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would
+have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he
+would have added his great name to imperialism.
+
+The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial
+State, of a race destined to empire.  In such a State, Nationality has
+no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.
+The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in
+literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century
+belonged to the idea of liberty alone.  The part which it has played in
+Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,
+above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four
+centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power.  In
+the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were
+inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the
+rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy
+into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics
+of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these
+ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.
+
+Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents
+itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,
+and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of
+1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to
+Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.
+Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was
+a shadow from the past.  The men of that time do not differ more widely
+from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great
+figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]
+The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German
+publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of
+history that the great _rôle_ which it has played is transient and
+accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards
+which the life of a State moves.  It is one thing to exalt the grandeur
+of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that
+it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.
+
+Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to
+trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's
+life more auspicious.  Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be
+ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State
+system of modern Europe.  For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,
+not merely to the present, but to the future world.  Rome effaced the
+distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the
+bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,
+made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain.  To the
+cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of
+municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew
+the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age.  For this,
+Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the
+stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the
+political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,
+shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not
+from papal, but from imperial Rome.
+
+The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,
+of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle
+of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as
+humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.
+Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but
+recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other
+continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,
+and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the
+side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.
+
+Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality
+and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against
+each other.  Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,
+of which the Nation is the constituent unit.  Ancient Hellas presents a
+similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but
+the City.  There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a
+conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a
+conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic
+imperialism.  And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert
+hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war.  The issue
+is known.
+
+The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her
+empire, was a disaster to humanity.  The spring of Athenian energy was
+broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of
+government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a
+ruin.  Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the
+lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.
+
+A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as
+this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.
+
+For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of
+Athens or the Rome of the Antonines.  Britain conquers, but by the
+testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her
+confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity.  "The earth
+is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's
+secret, her empire is the highway of nations.  That province, that
+territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby
+redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.
+
+This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between
+the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality--in the
+Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality--and the vital
+principle of the future.
+
+
+
+§ 3.  THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+
+But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less
+significant.  It is the first great war waged by the completely
+constituted democracy of 1884.  In the third Reform Bill, as we have
+seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their
+realization.  The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the
+fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,
+Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,
+attain in this Act their consummation and their end.  The wars waged by
+the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their
+constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig
+or Tory oligarchies of last century.  But in the present conflict a
+democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated
+by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.
+
+Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared
+together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles
+and the Islam of Omar.[4]
+
+Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted
+purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the
+ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.
+It was not Clive merely who gained India for England.  French
+incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought
+on our side.  Napoleon knew this.  What a study are those bulletins of
+his!  After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,
+assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"
+and so on till Waterloo.  His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power
+of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but
+not for ever.  The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the
+French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation.  The sarcasm,
+which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its
+edge--"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I
+opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds."  There is
+nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of
+unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,
+and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird.  The
+march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its
+primitive instincts.  The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the
+visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel
+of a cannon on board the _Muiron_.[5]  Napoleon was fighting for a dead
+ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal--how
+should he prosper?  Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine
+frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon
+policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to
+Ste Hélène.  Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made
+the return of mediaeval despotism impossible.  Dying, he bequeaths
+imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of
+Faust and Helena.  How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism
+Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.
+
+The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a
+capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism.  The "Serrar
+del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic
+States.
+
+The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to
+offer a closer parallel to this of Britain.  But a ruthless fanaticism,
+religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the
+Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs.  Spain fought with grandeur,
+heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the
+suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour
+frustrate and her devotion vain.  She warred against the light, and the
+enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races
+and generations unborn.  What criterion of truth, what principle even
+of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to
+assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting
+as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our
+fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of
+Spain?  England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods
+the methods of Spain.  The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for
+the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the
+triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria?  But, it is
+urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same
+stubborn, unyielding stock as our own."  In the sense that they are
+Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the
+characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,
+and the Norseman.  The best blood of the Teutonic race for six
+centuries went to the making of England.  At the period when the
+Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the
+English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the
+empire of the future.  As for the former clause of the assertion, it is
+accurate of no race, no nation.  The history of the United Provinces
+does not close with John de Witt and William III.  Can those critics of
+the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,
+and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland
+in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,
+the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and
+in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to
+Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested
+by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of
+Amsterdam to Brunswick?
+
+The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and
+literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race
+to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.
+In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious
+oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius
+in Macedon or in modern France.  When that force is withdrawn, there is
+an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an
+Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies
+also.  In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have
+never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic
+self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.
+
+From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh
+ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations
+of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and
+Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.
+
+But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to
+the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an
+impressive and even tragic significance.  For though the stage on which
+Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is
+not less elevated and serene.  A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as
+living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the
+warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then
+through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing
+within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the
+bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.
+But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a
+dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad
+succeed.
+
+And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and
+exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam
+of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to
+every student of speculative politics at the present hour is--Whither
+will this portent direct its energies?  Will it press onward towards
+some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,
+sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically
+inexhaustible forces to waste unused?
+
+The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every
+region of that empire and from every section of that society of
+nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race
+towards the present war, are not without deep significance.  Now at
+last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with
+the English race.  The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social
+environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions,
+are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not.
+Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the
+place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within
+his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon--"Our
+life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time."
+Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast
+bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one
+hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy,
+is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and
+of the course which this people will pursue?
+
+Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word
+English People has undergone.  When Froissart, for instance, in the
+fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him
+the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black
+Prince or de Bohun.  The work of the archers at Creçy and Poitiers
+extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the
+spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included
+under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.
+
+Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as
+late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks
+which it covered in the sixteenth century.  Thus when Chatham or Burke
+speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like
+Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view.  And
+Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame
+Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo.  The
+Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its
+responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the
+whole race, is intelligible enough.  But in this point the admirers of
+the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers
+of Pitt than the followers of Chatham.  The hazard of enfranchising the
+millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British
+blood, was a great, a breathless hazard.  Might not a mob arise like
+that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage
+added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making
+the guillotine a welcome release?
+
+But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it
+is a winning hazard.  To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the
+Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,
+from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy!  _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in
+its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on
+fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of
+Sidney and Wolfe.  Has not the present war given a harvest of
+instances?  The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death
+threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell
+message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of
+Abraham--"Have we won?"  Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,
+dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me
+aside, men, and go on!"  Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and
+summoned at great odds to surrender.  "Never!" was the brief imperative
+response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot
+through the heart, he falls dead.  This is the spirit of the ranks,
+this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the
+enfranchised masses.
+
+Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated.  Neither the Peninsular
+nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,
+exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the
+self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war
+by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their
+blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had
+sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it
+with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!
+
+
+
+§ 4.  COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+
+Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within
+the tented field or confined to the battle-line.  The eyes of the race
+are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts
+of the actors.  There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved
+purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,
+disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom,
+that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the
+past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not
+less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic.  Such
+manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its
+extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some
+earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising
+like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
+
+But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with
+Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism.  Now
+what is Cosmopolitanism?  It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it
+is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races.
+It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy.  It is
+the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its
+stead.  Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6]  It is the passion
+of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a
+Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of
+humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning.  But
+between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm,
+a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born
+of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is
+realized, the gulf is wide.  Napoleon knew this.  Nothing in history is
+more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from
+the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated
+sovereign, Francis II.  All his victories could not purchase him _that_!
+
+Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand
+sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the
+government, the army, the empire?  Or would they have it like the Roman
+mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire,
+battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and
+a circus ticket?  Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob
+and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space;
+but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is
+but an ignorant or a transient frenzy.  In religion itself have we not
+similar variety of expression?  Those faces gathered under the trees or
+in a public thoroughfare--the expression of emotion there is not that
+which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light
+falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St.
+Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers--but dare
+we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?
+
+
+
+§ 5.  MILITARISM
+
+And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite
+from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there
+is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments
+start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil
+which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and
+more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most
+reluctant.  Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the
+spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for
+all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of
+a misunderstanding or envious antagonism.  Whither is this impulse to
+be directed?  What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility
+of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this
+people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes?  How shall its
+bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from
+coalesced foes?
+
+Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole
+standpoint from which I have the right--to use a current phrase--to
+speak as an expert.  First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim
+which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen,
+the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate
+any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history.  It
+has no foundation in history at all.  Nothing in the past justifies the
+ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people.  Of an
+ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not
+disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless--who shall assign bounds to its
+devotion or determine the limits of its endurance?  I go further, I
+affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which
+England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later
+times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at
+this crisis--this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think
+no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since
+the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens--the ministry or cabinet
+which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find
+that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but
+the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of
+its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has
+marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth.  This, I maintain,
+is the verdict of history upon the matter.
+
+There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an
+argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations.  Men
+point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over
+civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from
+conscription!"  Such arguments have precisely the same value as the
+arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the
+terror of Jacobinism.  We might as well condemn all free institutions
+because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its
+abuses in other countries.  And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or
+to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an
+appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell.  Nor is
+there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,
+between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of
+Sophocles, a military State, attests.
+
+All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into
+being.  And this ideal of Imperial Britain--to bring to the peoples of
+the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher
+justice--the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that
+for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.
+Louis died.  There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage
+from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the
+just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of
+our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have
+brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise
+which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial
+Parliament is to the parliaments of the world--a paragon and an example.
+
+With us the decision rests.  If we should decide wrongly--it is not the
+loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is
+the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the
+inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes
+of the unborn.  Who can confront this unappalled?
+
+
+
+[1] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira,
+A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina.  The
+victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed
+himself in his divine mission.  Mohammed refers to this triumph in
+surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of
+Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.
+
+[2] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, _Fragmente aus der neuesten
+Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa_, Dresden, 1806,
+is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the
+classic on this subject.  It gained him the friendship of Metternich,
+and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent
+exponent of Austrian principles.  But he was sincere.  To the charge of
+being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with
+Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought.  The friendship of Rahel and
+Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion.  Nor is his undying
+hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he
+translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he
+not unsuccessfully imitated.  Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at
+Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just
+long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X.
+But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the
+strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear.  So that
+as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task.  Napoleon
+slept at St. Helena, his child, _le fils de l'homme_, was in a
+seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and
+Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; _quotusquisque
+reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset_? who was there any longer to
+remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schönbrunn?  And yet
+exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last,
+the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833,
+announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that
+of 1789.
+
+[3] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious
+but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when
+designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution
+of 1789.  It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688
+possible.  The true comparison--if any comparison be possible between
+revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though
+following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and
+character--would be between the Puritan struggle and the first
+revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of
+James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X.  Both Guizot, whose
+memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master
+Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison--the
+latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the
+imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the
+nation.
+
+[4] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present
+work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years
+between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.
+632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,
+A.D. 661.  Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality
+of Omar made themselves distinctly felt.  During the caliphate of Abu
+Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the
+two pontificates which immediately precede his own.  Omar's is the
+determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates
+of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its
+distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of
+Islam.  The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind
+mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of
+Sulla or the Athens of Pericles.  From the Arab historians a portrait
+that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise
+with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he
+undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his
+appearance and manners which tradition has preserved--"He that is
+weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have
+made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal
+with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."
+
+[5] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and
+Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same
+visionary but mighty designs.  In Napoleon's career the voyage on the
+frigate _Muiron_ marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from
+Gaul, January, 49 B.C.  But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the
+head of fifty thousand men.  Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone.  The
+best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, the "Roland"
+of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessières, Marmont, Lavalette, but
+to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of
+Kleber and the army of the Pyramids.  The adventure appears more
+desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited
+Napoleon at Paris.  Moreau was no Pompey.  The sequence of dates is
+interesting.  On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on
+board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he
+reached Ajaccio; on October 9th he lands at Fréjus, on the 16th he is
+at Paris, and resumes his residence in rue de la Victoire.  Three weeks
+later, on November 9th, occurs the incident known to history as 18th
+Brumaire.
+
+[6] The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even the
+antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism.  Rome, Hellas,
+Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern to a _more
+excellent_ degree than other States--Imperialism is the realization of
+this power.  Cosmopolitanism's _laissez-faire_ is anarchism or it is
+the betrayal of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+WHAT IS WAR?
+
+[_Tuesday, June_ 12_th_, 1900]
+
+Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the
+political development of the national as of the civic State, and that
+to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the
+future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be
+described as democratic displays itself--a mode which in human history
+is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with
+consequences memorable to all time--the problem meets us, will this
+form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war
+not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a
+State?  Even a partial solution of this problem requires a
+consideration of the question "What is War?"
+
+
+
+§ 1.  THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+
+The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as
+the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or
+from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the
+tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of
+Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the
+limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as
+just or unjust.  But another aspect of the question concerns us
+here--What is War in itself and by itself?  And what is its place in
+the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity,
+distinct from the unities which compose it?  Is war a fixed or a
+transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent,
+does its relation to the world-force admit of description and
+definition?
+
+If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive
+at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part
+which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical
+enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives,
+impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history,
+the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which
+humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another
+shape--whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a
+State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to
+the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the
+Highest Good?
+
+Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the
+conflict of two ideals.  The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a
+cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a
+profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of
+Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the
+ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which
+Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest
+trilogies.[1]  The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent
+gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and
+ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage
+to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least
+details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that
+of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and
+Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records
+were to perish.  _Qui habet tenam habet bellum_ is but a half-truth.
+No war was ever waged for material ends only.  Territory is a trophy of
+battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political
+genius, the imagination of the race.  One of the profoundest of modern
+investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the
+attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by
+which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2]
+The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops
+the latent qualities of a race.  The restless and melancholy surge, the
+wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of
+the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab.  Not the cry of
+"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by
+the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,
+spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the
+marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary
+homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of
+Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming.  To
+the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the
+transforming power of a new ideal.  The cry "_Deus vult!_" at Clermont
+marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of
+Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and
+Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the
+war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the
+troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the
+crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or
+of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.
+
+The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as
+an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and
+results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that
+indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus
+affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour--"Subit quippe etiam
+ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
+
+The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,
+reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the
+consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic
+kindred, amongst the nations of the earth.  If ever there were a race
+which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the
+Hebrew.  They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than
+Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their
+retreat by day and by night ceaselessly.  Every battle is a Lake
+Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that
+nerves the right arm of his faithful.  The forms of Gideon and Joshua,
+though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of
+their race--Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna.
+The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant
+for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of
+unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas
+Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the
+"Marseillaise," appear of no account--the _Al Naharoth Babel_--"Let my
+sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"--passing from the
+mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a
+rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when
+baulked of their God-appointed fate.  Yet on the shores of the Western
+Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they
+found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and
+Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.
+Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but
+even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of
+thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the
+character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which
+marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the
+certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he
+has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua
+of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in
+no lust for territory that these wars originate.
+
+In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war
+occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies
+in the Hebrew.  It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the
+pursuit of a fate-appointed end.  Aristotle, with his inveterate habit
+of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics,
+regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against
+the enervating influence of peace.  As the life of the individual is
+divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the
+life of the State is divided between war and peace.  But to greatness
+in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition.  The State which
+cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.
+"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State
+which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave."  Aristotle
+does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the
+sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is
+incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to
+freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that
+belongs to peace can never come.  Courage, Plato defines as "the
+knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not
+fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the
+unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that
+end is manifest.  This ideal element, this formative principle,
+underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from
+its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean
+League--from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as
+the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos
+by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last
+bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus.  It requires a
+steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of
+Greeks against Greeks--Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and
+Macedon--and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this
+consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to
+resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous
+fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of
+Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.
+
+Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's
+nature it is superfluous to speak.  As in statesmanship, so in war, he
+who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and
+thinks that all is said.  The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as
+an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the
+race that bore it to victory and world-dominion.  History by fate or
+chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius.  The
+silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of
+the _Labarum_ by Constantine heralded its decline.  With the emblem of
+humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the
+centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its
+ancient valour--as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and
+Zimisces[4]--bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman
+legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the
+ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the
+Bosphorus.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  DEFINITION OF WAR
+
+To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without
+deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element
+in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the
+present.  Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment
+of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny
+and in after ages, a profound enough significance.  Behind the
+immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the
+destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing
+relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly
+reveals itself.
+
+War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the
+State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus,
+the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment.
+Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life,
+whether of the conquering or of the conquered State.  War is thus a
+manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and
+awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man.  It is an action
+radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies,
++agôníai+, conflicts, of all life.  "In this theatre of a world," as
+Calderon avers, "all are actors, _todos son representantes_."  There
+too the State enacts its tragedy.  Nation, city, or empire, it too is a
+_representante_.  Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the
+Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the
+stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal.  A
+war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State
+analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's
+phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of
+the Summoner.  The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is
+content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny,
+and swerve not from its being's law.  Not to be envied is that man who,
+in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an
+organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God!  God is the God of
+all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the
+forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk.  A mockery?  That
+cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which
+is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in
+the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even
+through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through
+the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher
+freedom!"--is this a mockery?  Yet such is the prayer of armies.  War
+so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,
+regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or
+human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living
+and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide
+earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which
+they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come
+after them.  They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of
+achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown.  Fortunate!
+And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject
+unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so
+glorious a shape!"
+
+Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in
+poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human
+heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony
+to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence
+for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.
+
+
+
+§ 3.  COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+
+Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,
+to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their
+condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.
+Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern
+mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth
+century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of
+Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in
+the great days of Louis XV.  In the gray and neutral region where the
+spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as
+soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke
+the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to
+Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined
+limits of Greater Britain.  Of no other living writer can this be said.
+Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so
+instantly a universal hearing.
+
+How then does Tolstoi regard War?  For on this high matter the judgment
+of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny.  Examining his
+writings, even from _The Cossacks_, through such a masterpiece as _War
+and Peace_, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his
+latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his
+thought reveals itself--gradually increasing vehemence in the
+expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of
+oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by
+God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence
+turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision.  This general
+impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and
+characters.  Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say
+the Borodino, to describe?  That which rivets his attention, absorbs
+his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even
+of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle
+itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such
+spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched
+countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their
+own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the
+hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated
+limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death.  Has he the
+enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I?  In Napoleon, who in the
+sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere
+of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbé de
+Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without
+greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace,
+shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming
+myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning
+of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with
+which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat.  And the
+campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial?  Lodi, Arcola,
+Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig,
+Champaubert, and Montmirail?  These all are the deeds of Chance, of
+happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark,
+unthinking force resident in masses of men.  This is Tolstoi's
+conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the
+Semitic--its crowning glory in war.
+
+Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a
+visionary, not less great than Tolstoi--Carlyle.  Like Tolstoi, Carlyle
+is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew
+prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast
+between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's
+decrees, it is meant to be.  Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?
+His work is the witness.  After the brief period of Goethe-worship,
+from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not
+monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his
+work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,
+and the mystery of war.  One flame-picture after another sets this
+principle forth.  What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of
+Tolstoi!  Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of
+the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes.  These represent
+Carlyle in the flush of manhood.  His fiftieth year ushers in the
+battle-pictures of the Civil War--Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,
+when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation.  The greatest
+epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of _Frederick_, is
+also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings.  And
+finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the
+last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness
+of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,
+Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king.  In the last sea-fight of Olaf
+there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the
+same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when
+he wrote Valmy and Jemappes.  Since the heroic age there are no such
+battle-pictures as these.  The spirit of war that leaps and laughs
+within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of _Beowulf_ and
+the _Song of Roland_, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a
+sun.  The breath that blows through the _Iliad_ stirs the pages of
+_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick_; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,
+Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of
+modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the
+combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.
+
+Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not
+less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the
+Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes
+this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the
+circumstance of war?  To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as
+to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme
+expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic
+hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such.  To Carlyle
+war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence
+in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is
+that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above--a
+race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon
+the fortunes of the stricken field!  Carlyle, as his writings, as his
+recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the
+pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but
+are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled
+limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day
+after Borodino?  The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the
+battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker
+which discovers the united agony.  It was a profounder vision, a wider
+outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to
+that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi--the
+pathological.  And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been
+loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as
+his fathers before him have done.  Tolstoi has no system to crown, like
+Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of
+universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content.  Whither then
+shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?
+
+
+
+§ 4.  COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+
+Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a
+characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays
+itself.  The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a
+native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every
+epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan
+of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider
+than Voltaire's--Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval
+Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of
+France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr.
+Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a _Catiline_, and in later life
+seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the _Emperor and
+Galilean_, in the Rome of the fourth century.  But in Russia Tolstoi
+begins, and in Russia he ends.  As volume after volume proceeds from
+his prolific pen--essays, treatises theological or social, tales,
+novels, diaries, or confessions--all alike are Russian in scenery,
+Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their
+aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs.  Nowhere is there a trace
+of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured
+Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour.  In this he but resembles the Russian
+writers from Krilov to the present day.  It is equally true of Gogol,
+of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.
+If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at
+Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene
+Pavlovna unfolds itself.  Thus confined in his range, and in his
+inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker,
+springs straight from the heart of the race itself.  When therefore
+Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the
+judgment of the race.  In his conception of war the force of the
+Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius.  Capacity
+in a race for war is distinct from valour.  Amongst the Aryan peoples,
+the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life
+unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war
+sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the
+other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for
+the realization of a great political ideal.  Thus the history of the
+two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads
+like the history of Ireland.  It is studded with combats, but there is
+no war.  The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the
+Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis.  And three
+centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the
+charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius.
+Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and
+has no intelligible end.  And the noblest figure in Czech history,
+George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[7] has etched with
+laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a
+warrior.
+
+Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic
+resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs.  His sombre
+courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace.  Eyiau and
+Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of
+his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,
+illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in
+defence."  And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an
+instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal.  War has
+served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the
+aspirations of his race.  Conceived as the effort within the life of
+the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.
+He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or
+for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive
+ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never
+used it.  Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the
+Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan
+IV, and his successors, attests this.  The Don Cossacks destroy the
+last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from
+the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of
+Ginghis.  The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of
+Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable
+conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.
+The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics
+which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting.  Indeed
+the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,
+derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable
+languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political
+indifferentism.  Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,
+is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked
+the Slav throughout history.  Catherine the Great felt this.  Its
+spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that
+now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the
+fanaticism of the Moslem."  The impressive designs of Nicholas I left
+the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which
+has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a
+pseudo-Machiavellianism.  It does not originate, like the policy which
+a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described
+or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all
+must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the
+_camerilla_ which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind
+it.  Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the
+race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and
+false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of
+_Valérie_, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the
+noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[8]
+
+Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history
+throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war.  The government
+perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who,
+unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance
+not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual
+or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic
+people.  Therefore he will not die in exile.  The bigotry of a priest
+may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government,
+instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III,
+will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan
+Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.
+
+
+
+§ 5.  THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+
+There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the
+writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to
+which I must allude briefly.  There are many men within these islands,
+if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England
+in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague
+consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi
+declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ.
+This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence,
+more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may
+have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have
+now to offer.
+
+First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the
+past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most
+religious amongst the divisions of those races--the Hebrews, the
+Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii--have been the most
+warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends.  This fact
+is significant, because war, like religion and like language,
+represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.
+In a work of art, the _Phaedrus_ of Plato or the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
+of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,
+sovereign and despotic.  But as a language represents the happy moments
+of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit
+sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and
+to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of
+desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion
+the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of
+generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity
+in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the
+action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race.  Religion
+incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,
+the _will_, of a race.  Reflecting then on the part which war has
+played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those
+States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient
+features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as
+opposed to religion in general?
+
+Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is
+remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the
+faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled _My Religion_ has
+thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as
+distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have
+perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual
+utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one
+syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State
+and State.  The _locus classicus_, "All that take the sword," etc., is
+aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost
+range against civic revolt.  It is only by wrenching the words from
+their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to
+the relations of one State to another.  The organic unity, named a
+State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a
+mere aggregate of those units.  If there is a lesson which history
+enforces it is this lesson.  And upon the laws which regulate those
+unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word.  The violence of
+faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his
+utterances.  Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning
+rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the
+_Internationale_, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to
+Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in
+His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their
+fantasies.  But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the
+politics of State and State.  Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in
+His utterances, but not politics.  His solitary reference to war as
+such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it
+into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war.  And the peace upon
+which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity
+of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing.  It is the peace on
+which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises
+within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,
+of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the
+battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep
+and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert
+beneath the midnight stars.  Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his
+extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the
+same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who
+compose the State.  And of such a war as this in which Britain is now
+engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which
+in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger
+freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but
+the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being
+without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen
+the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State--who
+shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is
+contrary to the teachings of Galilee?
+
+Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of
+religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other
+means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the
+establishment of the empire of perpetual peace.  The advent of this new
+era, it is announced, is at hand.
+
+
+
+§ 6.  THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+
+Now the origins of this ideal are clear.  It is ancient as life, and
+before man was, it was.  It is the transference to the sphere of States
+of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the
+soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal
+leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in
+death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the _theôria_ of
+eternity.  The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and
+Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation
+of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in
+the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.
+
+Will War then never cease?  Will universal peace be for ever but a
+dream?  Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the
+forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the
+crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages
+the imagination of a race, is instructive.
+
+In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in
+the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster.
+"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
+good tidings, that publisheth peace!"  In this and in other splendid
+pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal
+in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested!
+In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted!  But
+it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of
+yet.  It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and
+beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being,
+inviolate of Time.  Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the
+world, centres in Judaea--in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the
+overthrow of all its adversaries.
+
+Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if
+peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the
+fountain from which it must flow.  It is an imperial peace bounded by
+Hellenic civilization, culture, laws.  It is a peace forged upon war.
+Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.
+
+"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.
+Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.  For my
+brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within
+thee.'"  Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a
+Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.
+
+Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her
+dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt.  Disregarding the
+dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the
+world outside those limits.  St. Just's proud resignation, "For the
+revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of
+those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire.  To pause
+is disaster; to recede, destruction.  Rome understood this, and her
+history is its great comment.
+
+To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not
+less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high.  Neither
+Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,
+stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than
+the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the
+Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment.  Then and
+then only shall the Holy War end.
+
+The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity
+of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending.  And
+Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all
+his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of
+an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims
+fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen
+music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things
+human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian
+age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but
+the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the
+proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's
+respite to a war-fatigued world.
+
+Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the
+Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval
+Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_.  This "Truce of God" was a
+decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain
+sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against
+another which darkens our early history.  It is the mediaeval
+equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of
+Universal Peace.  Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support
+than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,
+giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever
+received.  And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace
+is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[9] This is
+conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three
+centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the
+desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.
+This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona,
+where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that
+never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to
+bear the crusaders to Palestine--yet there were neither armies nor
+ships, it was but the fever of his dream.
+
+During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded.  The
+wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds.  "I am
+not come to bring peace among you, but a sword."  Luther, for instance,
+declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the
+ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the
+Albigenses.  War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it
+became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish
+Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes.  As
+Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the
+Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the
+position of the legists of the Reformation.  In his work, _De Jure
+Belli ac Pacis_, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is
+altogether set aside.  War is accepted as existent between nation and
+nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate
+it.  Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of
+Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its
+conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions
+which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost
+observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated.  But the
+treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the
+method of his contemporary, Verulam--the method of the science of the
+future.
+
+In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable
+enthusiast, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression
+upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.
+Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the
+same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.
+It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the
+Encyclopédie.  It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording
+the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless
+paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history
+arise.  Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's
+History, but its influence disappears as the work advances.  It charmed
+the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his
+impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory
+of France.[11]
+
+Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over
+the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.
+This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"
+This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of
+Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking
+out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest
+yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our
+race.  The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years
+ending in that great manner!  Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once
+more arises.  Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till
+six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent
+conference at The Hague.  Its derisive results, closing the debate of
+the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth
+century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of
+comment.
+
+Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of
+Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all
+in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or
+Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still
+in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil
+strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments
+of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in
+Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the
+wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugène, and of
+Frederick.  The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,
+the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the
+leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods.  On the
+other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great
+thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely
+the phantom of their logic, an _eidôlon specus_ created by their
+system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or
+desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all
+life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.
+
+Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life
+is answered by implication.  For the history of the ideal of Universal
+Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a
+manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as
+such, inseparable from man's life here and now.  In all these great
+wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the
+Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are
+ultimately phases of one Idea.  It is by conflict alone that life
+realizes itself.  That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of
+Being as such.  From the least developed forms of structural or organic
+nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,
+the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute.  The very magic
+of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something
+of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,
+mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across
+the abysses and orbits of the worlds.
+
+What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and
+the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born
+from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded
+struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of
+transcendent rapture and light?  By this conflict, multiplex or simple,
+the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,
+the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,
+is attained.  They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment
+of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a
+loveliness for ever.  And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the
+idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this
+_agonia_ increase.  It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest
+peace dwells.
+
+The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region
+of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.
+Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_,
+are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?
+
+And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is
+one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by
+conflict?  In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed
+of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each
+penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent
+_nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic
+all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as
+it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and
+have an end!  War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,
+there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler
+causes--but cease?  How shall it cease?
+
+Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a
+dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has
+crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,
+start from their orbits.
+
+
+
+§ 7.  IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+
+If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be
+asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this
+of Imperial Britain?  The effects upon war, will, I should say, be
+somewhat of this nature.  It will greaten and exalt the character of
+war.  Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of
+the present lie deep in the past.  In the wars of an imperial State the
+ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to
+the life of the present.  From the earliest tribal forays, slowly
+broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to
+the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle
+links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of
+empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice.  And this
+ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity
+of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,
+manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the
+'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes
+of a Cerdic or an Uffa.  For the State which by conquest or submission
+is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law
+of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in
+the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now
+forms a constituent and organic part.  And looming already on the
+horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to
+purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have
+greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal
+kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.
+
+Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the
+action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the
+attributes at once of the hero and the martyr.  Thus, when M. Bloch and
+similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its
+pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting
+from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of
+death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what
+end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past?  For the
+sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless
+powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished?  These
+are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the
+sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all
+untouched.  Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at
+Eyiau or at Gravelotte?  Let but the cause be high, and men will find
+means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no
+other!  And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its
+inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced.  The battlefield
+is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can
+contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent.  "The
+drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it
+deadens thought."  But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.
+Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in
+upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly.  Fighting for
+ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,
+knowing in his heart that they may never be at all.  Courage and
+self-renunciation have attained their height.
+
+Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare
+turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and
+self-directing energy.  Contemporary history makes it daily clearer
+that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever
+did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois.  Another genius and
+another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to
+celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism
+less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.
+
+Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death
+and the hour of his birth.  Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.
+In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?
+That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the
+stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present
+onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he
+has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the
+nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being.  Made
+strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full
+splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the
+battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering
+the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and
+various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to
+nature's day.  And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have
+been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the
+least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread
+pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks
+by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of
+the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry
+"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is
+lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the
+poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes
+approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.
+
+War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek
+orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with
+its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!
+And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"
+An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer
+on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more
+moving and a simplicity more heroic.  And these, I imagine, will be the
+results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its
+destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the
+State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its
+consummation there in the death on the battlefield.
+
+
+
+[1] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the
+connecting ideas of the three dramas, _Phineus, Persae, Glaucus_.  The
+trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis
+was still fresh in every heart.  The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"
+a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years
+earlier.  The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the
+conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the
+vanquished.  The cry in the _Persae_, "+ôpaides hellénôíte+", still
+echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of
+_modern_ Greece: "+deúte paides ton hellénôn+."
+
+[2] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch
+alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen
+Zügen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich
+niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des öffentlichen und
+rechtlichen Lebens begründet wurden."--_Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3rd
+ed., i, p. 19; _cf._ also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene
+Kriegsvölker gegeben, gebildet durch und für den Krieg, nicht
+Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein für den Krieg
+berechnet gewesen wäre, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfürsten, deren
+Herrschaft nur in Kriegführung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."
+
+[3] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies
+or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian,
+combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision
+in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events,
+characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or
+tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the
+test of historical criticism.  Their tactics and the composition of
+their armies make the precise share of this or that general in
+determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.
+Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the
+Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna,
+who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.
+13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster;
+and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the
+conqueror and first administrator of Irak.  The claims of Amr, or
+Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.
+638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the
+Sword of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the
+crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may
+justly entitle him to the designation--if that description can be
+applied to any one of the devoted band--of "Conqueror of Syria."
+
+[4] "The twelve years of their military command (_i.e._, of Nicephorus
+and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.
+The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the
+skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall
+not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."--Gibbon, chap. lii.  The
+reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening
+chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, _L'épopée
+Byzantine à la fin du dixième siècle_, Paris, 1896, which exhausts
+every resource of modern research into this period.  Zimisces' rise to
+power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century
+in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in
+Schlumberger's earlier volume, _Un Empereur byzantin_, Paris, 1890.
+
+[5] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the
+_Early Kings of Norway_.  "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon
+the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February
+15th, 1872.--Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_, vol. ii, p. 411.
+
+[6] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a
+devil-worshipper (_Data of Ethics_, § 14) must be regarded less as an
+effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just
+retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig
+Philosophy of the eighth of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_.
+
+[7] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the
+native language of Bohemia possible.  Two volumes had already been
+issued in German.  If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had
+the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech
+version of Palacky's _Geschichte Böhmens_.  After two centuries of
+subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia
+awoke and discovered that she had a history.  Of the seven volumes of
+the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George
+of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).
+
+[8] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the
+Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia?  "We," Tourgenieff once
+said, "we have given the samovar."  But that poet's own works, the
+symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed
+all this.
+
+[9] Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of
+mediaeval Europe.  It drew its origins from southern France, arising
+partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and
+bloody strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by
+the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed
+and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the
+thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the
+year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn.  Ducange has collected
+the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's
+admirable work, _La Paix et la Trève de Dieu, première édition_, 1857,
+_deuxième édition revue et augmentée_, 1869, sketches the growth of the
+movement.  With the eleventh century, though the social misery is
+unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of
+Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be
+observed are limited to two.  But towards the close of the century the
+rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the
+movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were
+extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the
+Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection.  With the decline of
+the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the
+influence and use of the Treuga waned.  The verses of the troubadour,
+Bertrand le Born, are celebrated--"Peace is not for me, but war, war
+alone!  What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays?  And the weeks, months,
+and years, all are alike to me."  The stanza fitly expresses the way in
+which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the
+close of the twelfth century.
+
+[10] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet,
+the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars.  It is thus
+synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and
+her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.
+St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.
+Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false
+impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil
+of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy.  An English
+translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the
+following characteristic title-page: "A Project for settling an
+Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and
+approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and
+now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of
+the French Academy."
+
+[11] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution
+as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace.  In a discourse
+delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he
+describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the
+flourishing of science and the extinction of wars."  France, he
+declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same
+time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us
+"to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure
+prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal
+peace and harmony take place."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+
+[_Tuesday, July_ 3_rd_, 1900]
+
+Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and
+traced in the second and third the development in religion and in
+politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards
+examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War
+and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and
+even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands
+attention.  How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to
+that from which all States originally derive?  How is it related to the
+Divine?  From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that
+of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of
+this Empire of Imperial Britain.
+
+From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the
+curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the
+deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the
+nations and the peoples of the earth?
+
+Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the
+State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the
+State.  But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity
+that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it.
+Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is
+not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws
+as regulate the life of the individual.  Not only the arraignment of
+the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or
+profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle
+utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with
+the unity of the individual.  But though no composite unity is governed
+by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that
+unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as
+they change, mutually transforming and transformed.  So is this unity
+of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the
+souls of men.
+
+
+
+§ I.  THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+
+Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is
+the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the
+soul of man.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,
+the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the
+higher thought of Europe.  The saint gives place to the crusader and
+scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of
+oriental paganism and oriental culture.
+
+Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like
+Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are
+profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature.  How shall
+the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the
+souls of men?  They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to
+dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile
+everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are
+appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by
+that Blood redeemed.  By what law or criterion of right does God send
+forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or
+bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the
+Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest
+of false prophets, Mohammed?  This trouble in the heart of the eleventh
+century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European
+imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first
+time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose
+heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was
+perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
+thought it vainly strove to imitate.  Underlying this trouble in their
+hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
+leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
+souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
+each mortal body immediately on its birth.
+
+Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there
+arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of
+its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children
+of men.  In the most remarkable and sublime of his six _Enneads_,
+another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1]  The fate of the soul
+in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a
+child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in
+a foreign land.  The child forgets its country and its kindred as the
+soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one
+with the Divine.  But after the lapse of years if the child return
+amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a
+word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the
+voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose
+shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and
+gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in
+upon the child--"Behold my father and my brethren!"  So the soul of
+man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine
+wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its
+heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,
+ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew
+there within the Everlasting.
+
+Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the
+problem before us.  Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of
+successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,
+permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the
+contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the
+measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.
+
+Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to
+the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the
+intelligence of the history of a day.  But as the beam of light never
+severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls within
+the caverns of the sea remains united with the orb whence it sprang, so
+the soul of man has grown old along with nature, and acquainted from
+its foundations with the fabric of the universe.
+
+Therefore when it confronts some simple object of sense or emotion, or
+the more intricate movements and events of history, or the rushing
+storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has
+within it preparations drawn from that fellowship with nature
+throughout the aeons, the abysses of Eternity.  And as the aeons
+advance, the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all its
+striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty of the ultimate
+attainment of that end increases.
+
+Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its ignorance of Eternity, it
+attains its rest in the Infinite, which seeking it shall find, piercing
+through every moment of the transient to the Eternal.  What are the
+spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds to the soul which is
+ever more profoundly absorbed, remembering, knowing, or in vision made
+prescient of its identity with the soul of the universe?  And as the
+ages recede, the immanence of the Divine becomes more consciously, more
+pervadingly present.  Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its
+destiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows of twilight, or
+in mysterious tones far-borne and deep as the chords struck by the
+sweeping orbs in space.
+
+The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue to the infinite,
+and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the
+ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge.  The past is dead,
+the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW
+the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the
+farthest presents, the most distant futures, are but changing phases.
+
+If then we regard the soul, its origin and its destiny, in this manner,
+what a wonder of light invests its history within Time!  Banished from
+its primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with what
+achievements has not the exile graced the earth, its habitation!
+Wondrous indeed is man's course across the earth, and with what shall
+the works of his soul be compared?  From those first uncertainties,
+those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly discerned as yet, lures him
+with tremulous ecstasies to eternise the fleeting, and in columned
+enclosure and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can control of
+the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.
+These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding
+his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by
+reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the
+worlds.
+
+And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn
+granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of
+Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed
+splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,
+iridescent with diamond and pearl.
+
+Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and
+moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by
+the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of
+the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer
+wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,
+and Shakespeare.
+
+And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and
+tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain
+its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on
+the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in
+wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last--in the
+_adagio_ of the great Concerto, in the _Requiem_, or those later
+strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the
+soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the
+shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,
+pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses--how dark,
+how silent!--a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first
+separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the
+ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and
+precursor yet shall know!
+
+Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things
+more excellent than man, the planets, for instance.  He is thinking of
+the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the
+keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not
+unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are
+living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and
+that fixed path athwart the night.  How much higher a will that
+steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable
+desires of human life.  But we know that the planet with all its mighty
+curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the
+moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark
+unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy
+imaginings, is accomplished.  And the thought of Pascal which might be
+a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the
+universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than
+the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to
+destroy the universe knows nothing.
+
+If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded
+and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it
+is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the
+State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should
+baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce
+them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false
+analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has
+in these lectures more than once been made.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+
+Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual
+soul, and thence to the Divine unity.  The soul of the State is the
+higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of
+the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that
+we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual
+life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State
+in itself and by itself.  Man in such relations does often merit the
+reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of
+a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems
+often to find justification.  Similarly, the exclusive admiration of
+many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as
+opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,
+discovers in a first study of these relations strong support.  But the
+artist is not isolated and self-dependent.  If the supreme act of a
+race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme
+poems, its language--deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race
+has contributed--so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State
+affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most
+independent of the State.  The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The
+solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether
+of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that
+Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into
+the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by
+ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the
+structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that
+isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[2]  And
+who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that
+lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the
+State?  For from the same source the component and the composite, the
+constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence
+that is in each is One.  "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or
+whither shall I flee from Thy presence?  If I ascend up into heaven,
+Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.  If I
+take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
+sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold
+me.  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall
+be light about me.  Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the
+night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to
+Thee."
+
+The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives
+whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not
+write the _Ajax_ because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, _El
+Condennado_ because Cortez defeated Montezuma.  Whatever law connect
+greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause
+and effect, of necessary succession in time.  They are the mutually
+dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the
+whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose
+being are beyond the region of cause and effect.
+
+Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of
+the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the
+Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between
+the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the
+State.  The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action,
+or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident
+with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development
+the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire.  For it
+is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the
+energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds
+expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and
+art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the
+individual.  But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the
+art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis,
+the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or
+in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the
+Hellenes.  A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,
+thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.
+Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo
+and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence
+competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the
+actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest.  So in Venetian
+history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which
+succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the
+painting but to the political greatness of Venice.
+
+As in civic so in national empires.  In Spain, Charles V and the
+Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of
+the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and
+Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez.  Racine and Molière
+serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander.  The mariners
+who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to
+the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries
+of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.
+
+Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their
+literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chénier and
+the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just.  An empire so glorious, if
+based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the
+age its sworn antagonist.  This stamped his empire as spurious.
+
+But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in
+action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect.  For the
+roots of their identity we must search deeper.  The transcendent deed
+and the work of art alike have their origin in the _élan_ of the soul,
+the diviner vision or the diviner desire.  The will which becomes the
+deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet
+one; and this _élan_, this energy of the soul, what is it but the
+energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time?
+Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration,
+imperfect, of the spirit of man.  The greatest books that ever were
+written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most
+delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever
+came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the
+soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them.  The
+unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works
+is dimly adumbrated.  The most perfect statue is but an imperfect
+semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying
+and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward
+vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic
+height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.
+
+In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself supremely, and with a
+flame-like vividness.  There the divine origin of the State which in
+the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of
+art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic
+action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned.  If
+artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the
+Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar.
+The thought and the deed, +lógos kaì poíêsis+, here are one.
+
+
+
+§ 3.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+
+We have now reached the final stage of our inquiry.  Is there any law
+by which the vicissitudes of the States, whose origin has been traced
+through the individual to a remoter and more awful source, are fixed
+and directed?  And can the decay of empires, those supreme forms in the
+development of States, be resolved into its determining causes, or do
+we here confront a movement which is beyond the sphere ruled by cause
+and effect?
+
+In Western Europe a broken arch and some fragments of stone are often
+all that mark the place where stood some perfect achievement of
+mediaeval architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey.  But on the
+lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a ruin hardly more
+conspicuous may denote the seat of an empire.  Such a region, fronting
+the desert, formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon his
+own destiny and that of the nations.  Those two inquiries have
+proceeded together.  His vision of the universe, original or accepted,
+inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the
+historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in
+time and space.
+
+Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,
+Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or
+applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the
+present hour.  Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations
+of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.
+
+The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of
+Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a
+divine vengeance.  The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and
+of wrong-doing.  The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption
+and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.
+Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the
+individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's
+history been decreed and proclaimed.  Hebrew thought was perplexed and
+amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and
+the unjust man, and the misery of the good.  But the sublime and
+inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the
+punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and
+States.
+
+In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout
+Greek and Roman thought.  In St. Augustine it reappears in its original
+shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of
+an historical argument.  A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful
+sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted
+by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,
+attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the
+Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it.  He sees Rome fall;
+and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome
+becomes to Augustinus--the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of
+her pride, her idolatry, and her sin.  Rome falls as Babylon, as
+Assyria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some
+fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass
+away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces
+with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.
+
+So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for the theme
+of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a
+scroll.  Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a
+procession of empires--Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,
+and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of
+Charlemagne and of the Othos.  Their successive falls point to man's
+obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of
+the Judgment.
+
+The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[4] and of the Cardinal
+Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century
+Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive
+and finished than that of Augustine himself.  In recent times this
+theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and
+Carlyle.  It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, _The
+Stones of Venice_.  The value of that work is imperishable, because the
+documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and
+sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison.  Yet its
+philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,
+and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master.  The
+bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever
+permitted himself to imagine.  In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates
+the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is
+that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era
+lies the salvation of England.  Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its
+great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of
+the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of
+Christianism of which that standard was the emblem.  But in the
+sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the
+consequence.
+
+In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State
+identical with that indicated in the second lecture.  They exhibit the
+effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a
+design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or
+ought to be.  Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty
+aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind
+assaults of fate and man.  In individual life, therefore, the primitive
+conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life
+of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the
+succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts,
+creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of
+phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the
+narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from
+detection.  Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire,
+and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the
+grave.  And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured
+amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier
+heights and the icy solitudes of thought.
+
+
+
+§ 4.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+
+The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls
+the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons
+and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.  This theory varies little;
+the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer
+change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato
+or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or
+in the sentimental musings of Volney.  The vicissitudes are no more
+determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain
+ethical rules.  Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme
+of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws.  The
+mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with
+the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.
+
+It appears late in the development of Hebrew thought, and finds its
+most remarkable expression in the fragment, the writer of which is now
+not unfrequently spoken of as "Khoëleth."[5]  "One generation passeth
+away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.
+The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place,
+where he arose.  The wind goeth towards the south and turneth about
+unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
+again according to his circuits.  The thing that hath been, it is that
+which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done,
+and there is no new thing under the sun.  Is there anything whereof it
+may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which
+was before us.  There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall
+there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that
+shall come after."
+
+The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as
+Khoëleth, brooding on the same world-wide things.  Like him, he looks
+out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;
+like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in
+their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the
+history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its
+circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it
+came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal
+the tedious story of man.  In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,
+tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception
+recurs.  It is the central and informing thought of his life as a
+philosophical thinker.  But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming
+the slave of a theory.  He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle
+in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence
+if not rest.  Its precise character he nowhere describes.
+
+Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.
+He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the
+gloomy energy which hate supplies.  In depth and variety of creative
+insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the
+psychology of death, he stands alone.  His is the most profoundly
+imaginative nature that Rome produced.  Three centuries before the fall
+of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns
+to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in
+the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the
+fourth.  Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read
+at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,
+the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deûm ira in rem Romanam_ of
+the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution
+appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,
+esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the
+havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but
+their own vengeance, do the gods desire."  It is as if, transported in
+imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the
+judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint
+Augustine.  Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and
+of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the
+wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits
+of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing.  His
+sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and
+deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.
+
+A passage in the _Annals_ may fitly represent the impression of reserve
+which these three mighty spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,
+at moments convey.  "Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in incerto
+judicium est, fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte
+volvantur; quippe sapientissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum
+aemulantur, diversos reperias, ac multis insitam opinionem non initia
+nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis curae; ideo creberrime
+tristia in bonos, laeta apud deteriores esse; contra alii fatum quidem
+congruere rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud principia
+et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen electionem vitae nobis
+relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, certum imminentium ordinem; neque mala
+vel bona quae vulgus putet."[7]
+
+And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence
+upon Thucydides.  It even forces the structure of his later books into
+the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a
+verse of Sophocles the theme.  But his earlier and greater manner
+prevails, and from the study of his work the mind passes easily to the
+contemplation of the doom which awaited the destroyers of Athens, the
+monstrous tyrannies in Syracuse, and Lacedaemon's swift ruin.
+
+Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves attention.  It was a
+habit of writers of the eighteenth century, in treating of the
+vicissitudes of empires, to state one problem and solve another.  The
+question asked was, "Is there a law regulating the fall of empires?";
+but the question answered, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, was, "Is
+there a remedy?"  Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in places to refer
+the ruin which he anticipated to Rome's departure from the austerity
+and simplicity of the early centuries.  In the luxury of the Caesars he
+discerns but another condemnation of the policy of Caius Julius.
+
+The use which Gibbon has made of this argument is celebrated.  In
+Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan
+and of Marcus, exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for
+the Republic exercises over the art and thought of Tacitus.  Both
+desiderate a world which is not now, musing with fierce bitterness or
+cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer.  Both
+ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted?  How
+could the decline of Rome have been stayed?"  Tacitus is the greater
+poet--more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,
+profounder in his insight into the human heart.  But a common
+atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and
+again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work
+gains thereby.  A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's
+_Trionfi_, or the _Antiquités de Rome_ of Joachim du Bellay, redeems
+from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march
+of many a balanced period.[8]  But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for
+a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic
+theory of the decline of empires.
+
+His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic
+purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and
+the bent of his own intellect.  He combats the same enemy as Voltaire
+waged truceless war upon--the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of
+insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and
+religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
+derived their power.  And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.
+There is scarcely a living conception in the _Decline and Fall_ which
+cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.
+Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a
+section in the _Essai sur les Moeurs_.
+
+Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient
+simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[9]  With Zosimus
+he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,
+and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred
+defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.
+This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the
+furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the
+great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail
+lavished upon the portraits of their enemies.  Half-seriously,
+half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in
+Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of
+the Antonines.
+
+And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the
+decline of Venice to its abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,
+influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall
+of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.
+
+
+
+§ 5.  WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+
+Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the
+cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth
+and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that
+the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be
+averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified.  The
+mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall
+endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.
+He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the
+government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.
+And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still
+proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.
+
+But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or
+surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the
+passing of youth.  Man might as well start once more to discover the
+elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that
+shall not pass away.
+
+To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like
+pondering too curiously the question why a man dies.  In the
+vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as
+in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life.  The tracts and
+regions governed by cause and effect are behind us.  An empire, like a
+work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an
+integral portion or phase of that end.  From the concept, "Empire,"
+duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in
+the concept itself.  Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are
+alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself
+through the individual in the State.  The curve of an empire's history
+is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes.  It is a portion of
+the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades
+analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul
+which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.
+
+Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of
+a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to
+the heart's desire, is vain enough.  The Eros of Praxiteles and the
+Athênê of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,
+are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover
+the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus.  But the moment within the soul of
+the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and
+completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision
+has not passed away.  It has become part of the eternal, as the
+aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or
+Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal.  Man, born into a
+world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments
+the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed.  The artist,
+the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world.  Yet is
+this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and
+change.
+
+In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes
+itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art.  The form perishes,
+nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,
+endures.  As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the
+individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or
+imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race.  It
+is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative
+purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.
+The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it.  Athênê or Roma
+are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most
+subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from
+myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded.  Those
+heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a
+Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the
+State to itself, rudely or faultlessly.  Philip and Alexander, Baber
+and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than
+other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.
+The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men.  To
+Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all
+brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is
+an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the
+Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas.  Akbar started as his
+grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10]
+But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or
+heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of
+earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled
+for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon.  Apprehending the unity
+beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,
+Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and
+essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had
+done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal
+beneficence, and truth, and life.  He failed, but failed greatly.
+
+The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in
+thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of
+humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither
+converge again.  Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in
+terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of
+Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas
+as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven
+into a chain of causes and effects.
+
+Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human
+thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things.  As
+life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of
+human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize
+itself and life.  Every effect is in turn a cause.  Therefore every
+cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and
+simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued
+life of the cause.  Universes and the soul of man are but
+self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within
+Cause immortal, effect within effect unending.  "Man," it has been
+said, "is the inventor of Nothingness.  Nature and the Universe know it
+not."  The past wields over the present a power which could never be
+derived from Death and Nothingness.  No age, as was pointed out in the
+first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present.  As if
+we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of
+the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the
+scenes designed for other eyes.  Even our most living impulses we
+interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,
+so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were
+dead.
+
+But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when
+most deeply absorbed in the past.  The soul of man is the true Logos of
+the universe.  It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of
+the aeons is it a stranger.  It heard the informing voice which
+instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the
+bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and
+the hills about them like a covering of flesh.  Therefore time and
+death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets
+over against the substance which lives and is eternally.
+
+And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than
+elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,
+the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change
+them, and they shall be changed," seems realized.  The death of a
+State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which
+a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their
+ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is
+secured.
+
+In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled
+splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary
+eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,
+which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become
+the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse
+phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."
+Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs
+pursued--tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,
+national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of
+glorious wisdom--all or any of these might have warded off the doom of
+Portugal and of the house of Avis.  Bur these things were not in the
+blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da
+Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral.  It is as vain to seek in
+depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the
+Inquisition or the Papal power.  Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,
+would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be
+overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the
+nation which creates it.  If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the
+soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the
+question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which
+acts in this manner?  What is the ideal powerful enough to make the
+hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?
+The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[11] is not
+a nation of adventurers.  Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the
+Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here.  Dom Sebastian's
+device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of
+which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero--"A
+glorious death makes the whole life glorious."  And the genius of the
+nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death.  To Portugal Dom
+Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the
+far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,
+whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of
+Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few
+faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their
+fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever
+is memorable in their later history.
+
+Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,
+which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths.  Spain, as
+Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as
+England acted.  Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the
+Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power
+pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and
+for two generations made the Crusades live again.  It is another
+Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness.  She defies
+Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[12] as she had
+defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.
+
+Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,
+in the life of States and in human destiny.  Roman grandeur is not dead
+whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive.  To Petrarch
+the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,
+and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.
+
+For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for
+humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her
+language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other
+races and to other times.  In the world's _palaestra_ she had thrown
+the _discus_ to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as
+Rome was dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle to
+surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.
+
+For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this
+Empire of Britain?  In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception
+of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending
+over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the
+still brow the secret of his own destiny.  Rome does not die there.
+Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and
+all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six
+hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most
+penetrating, and all-informing.  Roman definiteness of thought and act
+were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.
+From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative
+justice is born.  Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius
+which was Rome still pulses within it.  By the energy of feudalism the
+ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.
+Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the
+famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills
+with its radiance a darkened world.  Religious oppression is stayed,
+but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,
+what a temple is reared for it by the Seine!  And now in this era, and
+at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more
+alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely
+to make here its lasting mansionry.  For in very truth, in all that
+freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,
+is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the
+vanguard of humanity?
+
+Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,
+of Assyria.  In her purposes their purposes lived.  Mediaeval
+imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome.  In Britain the
+spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation.  The form decays, the
+divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,
+indestructible.  And thus the destiny of empires involves the
+consideration of the destiny of man.
+
+
+
+[1] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical
+text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as
+follows:
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+[2] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et
+agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs
+better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism
+of the State.  Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.
+Spinoza, if this were written _circa_ 1665, has in view, perhaps, the
+Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port
+Royal aux Champs.
+
+[3] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast
+intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance
+which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the
+imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe
+alone of moderns have the power to reproduce.  The _De Civitate_ is his
+greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in
+intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery
+and diction.  The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and
+the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has
+curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan
+poetry.  Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme.  Criticism
+indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the
+comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the
+men of after times who loved them most--Tacitus and St. Augustine,
+Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.
+
+[4] The _World-History_ of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the _De
+Civitate_ of St. Augustine.  He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"
+_i.e._, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval
+standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the
+year A.D. 1146.  His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the
+Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole.  He is uncritical in
+the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his
+habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval
+monastery invests the work.  In the following year he started on the
+crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote
+his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the
+emperor Barbarossa.
+
+[5] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this
+word have all been disputed.  Thus the use of the original is
+convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories
+of theologians or Hebraists.  Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with
+scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses
+both erudition and charm.
+
+[6] What figures from the _Comédie Humaine_ of Roman society of the
+first century throng the pages of Tacitus--Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso,
+Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo,
+Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women
+of the _Annals_--imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or
+loyal--Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of
+Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia
+Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!
+
+[7] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the
+earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as
+follows:
+
+"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine
+judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and
+immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and
+fortune.  For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted
+wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do
+varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods
+have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all.
+Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with
+so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so
+great prosperities.  Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and
+destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at
+all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of
+naturall causes as from their beginning.  And these graunt withall,
+that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being
+once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our
+end.  Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the
+vulgar do so call."
+
+Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile
+commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the
+sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.
+
+[8] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's _Triumphs_.
+The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in
+the studied pages of his confessional--the Latin treatise _De Contemptu
+Mundi_--pervades these exquisite poems.  Du Bellay's _Antiquities_,
+which Spenser's translation under the title of _The Ruines of Rome_ has
+made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon
+the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558.  The beautiful
+_Songe sur Rome_ accompanied them.  Two years later Du Bellay, then in
+his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died.  The preciousness of these
+poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend
+of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's _Ballades_ to the
+passing of empires and of Rome.
+
+[9] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of
+Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official
+of high rank at Constantinople.  The fifth and sixth books deal with
+the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city
+by Alaric (A.D. 395-410).  Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the
+revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new
+religion.  The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the
+brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship
+and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing
+designs of the Emperor Julian.
+
+[10] Baber's own memoirs, _Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber,
+emperor of Hindustan_, one of the priceless documents of history, show
+the manner in which he conceived his mission.  Here is his account of
+the supreme incident in his spiritual life; "In January, 1527,
+messengers came from Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of
+Mewar, and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the west.  On
+February 11th I went forth to the Holy War.  On the 25th I mounted to
+survey my posts, and during the ride I was struck with the reflection
+that I had always resolved to make an effectual repentance at some
+period of my life.  I now spoke with myself thus--'O my soul, how long
+wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin?  Not bitter is repentance:
+then taste it thou!  Since the day wherein thou didst set forth on a
+Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes for thy salvation.
+And he who sacrificeth his life to save his soul shall attain that
+exalted state thou wottest of.'  Then I sent for the gold and the
+silver goblets, and broke them, and drank wine no more, and purified my
+heart.  And having thus heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings
+of peace, and being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I
+commanded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war against the
+evil in our hearts."  Such was the mood in which, on the 24th of the
+first Jemadi, A.H. 933, Baber proceeded to found the Mogul Empire.
+
+[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles
+south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578.  The king, Dom
+Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.
+As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal
+which had not its dead to mourn.
+
+[12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,
+along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most
+memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying
+lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting
+has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger
+Cagliari.  Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the
+seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605.  It consists of two works--the
+_Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up
+for the secret use of the Council of Ten.  Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems
+to have lived with a pen in his hand.  His manuscripts in the Venice
+archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes.  The first collected edition
+of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the
+Bastille.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+[_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900]
+
+Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast
+through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of
+things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires
+exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual
+happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,
+unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history
+to the present hour.  They are ancient as the rocks and their musings
+from eternity, inextinguishable as the _élan_ of the soul imprisoned in
+time towards that which is beyond time.
+
+And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to
+render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real
+Illusion--more poignant.  Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are
+mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1]
+when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.
+
+Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the
+study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or
+life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers.  Nothing so
+instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under
+"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,
+states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such
+attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the
+ordinances of the world.
+
+  Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.
+  Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]
+
+
+Nor does this result in the mood of Candide.  The effort unconquered
+and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it
+is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in
+very truth it is.
+
+Thus we are prepared to consider the following question.  Given that
+death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will
+this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall?  Will the form
+it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of
+Akbar, have passed away?  The question resolves itself into two
+parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist?  And,
+secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or
+gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to
+determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or
+Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?
+
+
+
+§1.  THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+First of all with regard to the former question.  Recent studies in
+ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies
+of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not
+the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of
+recently civilized races.  Yet this assumption still underlies much of
+the current speculation on the subject.  Last century it was received
+as an axiomatic truth.  Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic
+interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in
+them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus.  Not only
+Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,
+as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.
+Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their
+customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _littérateurs_
+indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi
+they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document
+lasting as the _Germania_.  Such comparisons are still at times made,
+but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;
+both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only
+in appearance.  It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood
+and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with
+many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius.  It
+is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the
+youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in
+refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of
+political energy.  The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like
+Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of
+philosophy.  Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor
+"Wertherism" for the battlefield.
+
+But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth
+consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to
+frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great
+political end.  Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the
+influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a
+youthful race.  The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in
+Europe.  Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its
+society alike attest this.  Superstition is not youth, else we might
+look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the
+cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future.  And
+prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be
+governed, as the genius to govern others.
+
+And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown
+that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,
+either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.
+
+The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities
+of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as
+was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,
+and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.
+
+The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the
+Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad.  It is
+a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not
+only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in
+individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments
+of history and of life, the original stock asserts itself.  The State
+is young; but the race is precisely of the same remoteness as Britain
+and the Greater Britain.
+
+Passing to the second point--at what epoch do we now stand as compared
+with Rome or Islam?  It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged
+empire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly rest upon a
+misapprehension, first, of the period in which the Nation of England
+strictly speaking arises, and secondly, of the period in which the
+Empire of Britain arises.
+
+The traditional date of the landing of Hengist does not indicate a
+moment analogous to the moment in the history of Rome marked by the
+traditional date of the foundation of the city.  The date 776 B.C.
+marks the close of a process of transformation and slow revolving unity
+extending over centuries, so that the era of Romulus and the early
+kings, Numa, Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch in Rome's
+history analogous to the period in England's history between Senlac and
+the constitutional struggle of the thirteenth century.  The former is
+the period in which the civic unity of Rome is completed.  The latter
+is the period in which the national unity of England is completed.
+Rome is now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, _urbs
+Roma_, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is finally
+conscious to itself of its career as a nation.  Magna Carta and the
+constitutional struggle which followed may be said to determine the
+course of the national and political life of England as much as the
+Servian Code founded the civic unity and determined the character of
+the constitutional life of Rome.
+
+And, as was pointed out in an earlier lecture, already in Rome and in
+England there are premonitions, foreshadowings of the future.  The
+design of the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal
+city, and the devotion of the _gens Fabia_ announces the Roman legion.
+And in those wars of Creçy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless
+heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the
+chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the
+squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of
+fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"?  And in 1381,
+the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of
+the archers of Creçy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and
+wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of
+England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism
+and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and
+warlike of the present hour?  So that even as a nation, about eighteen
+generations may be said to sum England's life, whilst, as we have seen,
+Britain's conscious life as an empire extends backwards but to three
+generations or to four.  Thus if the question were asked, With what
+period in the history of Rome does the present age correspond?  I
+should say, roughly speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus
+and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three hundred years to
+run; and in the history of Islam, with the period of the early
+Abbassides, when the fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four
+centuries removed.
+
+Does this justify us in inferring that the course which England has to
+run will extend still over three centuries and that then England too
+will pass away, as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away?  So
+far as the determination of the eras in our history which correspond in
+development to eras in the history of Rome or of Islam is concerned,
+the inference from analogy possesses a certain validity.  And the
+accidental or fixed resemblances between the empires of Islam,[3] Rome,
+and Imperial Britain are numerous and striking enough to render such
+comparisons of real significance to speculative politics.  But the
+similarity in structural expansion or in environment which can be
+traced throughout the completed dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found
+only in the initial stages of Imperial Britain.  Then the argument from
+analogy fails, and our judgment is at a stand.
+
+Assuming that each imperial race starts its career dowered with a vital
+capacity of definite range, and allowing for the necessary divergences
+in their course between a civic and a national state.  Imperial
+Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the present era to have
+reached a stage represented by the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to
+proceed further is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that now
+arises between the circumstances of the two empires.  During the
+present century the vast transformations which have been effected by
+science in the surroundings of man's physical life make all speculation
+upon the duration of Imperial Britain by analogies drawn from the
+duration either of Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash.
+
+The growth of the idea of freedom, and the modern interpretation of
+that idea in the spirit of Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the
+English nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks to a
+degree unparalleled in the ancient world.  The self-recuperative powers
+of the race have been strengthened by the course of its political and
+religious history.  Fresh blood adds new energy to effete stocks.  The
+effect of this restorative power from within is heightened in manifold
+ways by such a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomotion
+which have arisen during the past two generations.
+
+In the age of the first conscious beginnings of Imperial Britain, the
+communication between the regions of the empire was as difficult as in
+the Rome of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness has been
+synchronous, not only with increased intercourse between the ranks of
+the same nation, but with increased intercourse between all the various
+climes of an empire upon which the sun never sets.  From city to city,
+from town to town, from province to province, from colony to colony,
+emigration and immigration, change and interchange of vast masses of
+the population are incessant.  This increased intercommunication
+between the various members of the race, the influences of the change
+of climate upon the individual, aided by such imperceptible but
+many-sided forces as spring from the diffusion of knowledge and
+culture, mark a revolution in the vital resources and the environment
+in the British, as distinguished from the Saracenic or Roman race, so
+extraordinary that all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated
+is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses as to be useless
+or misleading.
+
+Nature seems pondering some vast and new experiment, and an empire has
+arisen whose future course, whether we consider its political or its
+economic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves conjecture
+behind.  The world-stage is set as for the opening of a drama which, at
+least in the magnitude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance
+of its action, will make the former achievements of men dwindle and
+seem of little account.
+
+
+
+§ 2.  THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections,"
+by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial
+Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as
+we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of
+past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to
+the destiny of man.
+
+To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had
+left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision
+of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther
+from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair
+of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus
+Lucretius.
+
+This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden
+receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the
+dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or
+philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the
+Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western
+Isles.  Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which
+awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,
+as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which
+Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.
+
+But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which
+Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian
+dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and
+of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,
+perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of
+poetry.  In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul
+at death.  Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from
+this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,
+which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances
+swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial
+Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future.  Thus, as the
+immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the
+desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so
+has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope.  Man,
+tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least
+intimations of Reality.
+
+But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the
+interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain
+characteristics in common.  From far behind to far in front the dream
+has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to
+horizon, but it remains one dream.  The earthly Paradise of the social
+reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and
+devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic
+evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding
+from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy
+and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the
+Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but
+in diminished beauty and poetry.  The dream of unending progress is
+vain as the dream of unending regress.[4]
+
+Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile
+are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued
+bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with
+delineations of torment and endless woe.  And Aeschylus has remarked,
+and La Rochefoucauld and Helvétius bear him out, how much easier a man
+finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in
+his joy.
+
+Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the
+depravity of the human heart.  They are the recognition by the dark
+Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the
+Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to
+the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on
+this earth, perfect peace is a mockery.  But in Time, misery is the
+soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments
+of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative.  They are the
+moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from
+stress of agony or delight or mere weariness.  Therefore with
+stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to
+grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;
+therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell
+succeeds.
+
+It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the
+infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the
+soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable
+of the only reality, the Eternal Now.
+
+
+
+§ 3.  THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS
+
+The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the
+Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most
+significant features of the present age.  Its dominion over art,
+literature, religion, can no longer escape us.  It is the dominant note
+of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of
+the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides
+itself.  A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a
+consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations
+of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.
+
+The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal.  The European of that
+age is a visionary.  The unseen world is to him more real than the
+seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the
+soul from earth to heaven.  The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw
+night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining
+battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the
+world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and
+Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times
+looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but
+phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.
+
+But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of
+the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour
+is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable
+pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,
+his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the
+ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in
+accepted defeat or in formulated despair.
+
+With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the _Wahn_ of religious
+freedom.  The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,
+crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes--but shall not
+the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the
+pure faith of primitive times?  When the last of the scholastics was
+being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless
+task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of
+four centuries.
+
+The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort
+of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,
+nearer to the truth.  The successive phases of this struggle may be
+compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and
+setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,
+the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and
+Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,
+learned the value of the word of a king.  Martin Luther is the
+protagonist of the first of the four great dramas that follow.  Its
+theme is the consecration of man to sincerity in his relations to God.
+There, even at the hazard of death, the tongue shall utter what the
+heart thinks.
+
+The second drama is named _Ignatius Loyola_; the theme is not less
+absorbing--"Art thou then so sure of the truth and of thy sincerity, O
+my brother?"  Whatever his followers may have become, Don Inigo remains
+one of the most baffling enigmas that historical psychology offers.
+From his grave he rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are the
+acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty.
+
+What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of the third drama--Thurn,
+Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Condé, Oxenstiern!
+And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the conflict between
+moribund Jesuitism and Protestantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay
+aside their masks in the world's great tiring-room of death, a new Age
+in world-history has begun.
+
+As religious freedom is the _Wahn_ of the Reformation drama, so it is
+in political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself.
+Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use
+of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the
+dark places of the world!  This is the new avatar, this the glad
+tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age.  Of
+this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most
+perfect expression.  What is this faith for which Condorcet and his
+party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the
+guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths--Vergniaud,
+Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, Gensonné, Pétion, Buzot, Isnard?
+"Oh Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!" was not a reproach,
+but, in the gladness of the martyr's death which consecrated all the
+life, it was the wonder, the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace
+in some deeper reconcilement.  Behold how strong is their faith!  Marie
+Antoinette has her faith, the injunction of her priest, "When in doubt
+or in affliction, think of Calvary."  Yet the hair of the Queen
+whitens, her spirit despairs.  The Girondinist queen climbing the
+scaffold, not less a lover of love and of life than Marie
+Antoinette--what nerves her?  It is the star of the future and the
+memory of Vergniaud's phrase, "Posterity?  What have we to do with
+posterity?  Perish our memory, but let France be free!"
+
+How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these
+men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,
+witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other
+two for which saint and reformer died!  And their battle-march, which
+is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,
+the vision of the future of the world, which closes _Hellas_.
+
+This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith
+that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in
+political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.
+Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young,
+for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille
+Charles James Fox sees it arise.  "By how much," he writes to a friend,
+"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!"  Its
+presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed.  Wordsworth,
+Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!
+The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human
+heart!  First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!
+
+This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath
+to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its
+poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy.  It is the
+faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart
+Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the
+Girondins.  For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the
+federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the
+Second Age pass.  Not in political any more than in religious freedom
+could man's unrest find a panacea.  The new heavens and the new earth
+which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw
+beyond the sunset.
+
+And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of
+space and search the depths of time?  If the utmost dreams of science,
+and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if
+the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of
+every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure
+analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the
+annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle
+brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave the spirit
+unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its
+infinitude.
+
+The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age
+are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet.  As Mirabeau, the
+intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that
+principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,
+from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in
+its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that
+_bienfaisance_ which the Abbé de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be
+styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond
+the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood.  In over a
+hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,
+Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them
+even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his
+faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,
+education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free
+trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind.  It is in
+this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central
+thought of his system is developed.  He may have derived it from
+Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest
+biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later
+writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to
+scientific rule and line his living thought.  Where they most are
+faithful, there his followers are greatest.
+
+In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find
+scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the
+speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume
+after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,
+only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,
+tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of
+earlier times.
+
+Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an
+eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that
+there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.
+A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,
+recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has
+invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting
+and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of
+Phidias.  In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat
+of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of
+Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!
+
+Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of
+the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius
+imparts.[6]  But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade
+the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek
+its peace where he himself had found it, in Art.  So the labour of the
+scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's
+spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.
+The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working
+obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in
+the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence
+in proclaiming its unknowableness.  Glimmerings from the Eternal visit
+the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the
+incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it
+were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.
+
+
+
+§ 4.  THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+
+But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the
+Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined.  For the
+soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the
+deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the
+body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,
+sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in
+Time nor its going down in Space.  Nor is it in knowledge, whether of
+the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,
+legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a
+vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not.  Then
+instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or
+theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which
+man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being
+play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a
+scroll.  The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an
+azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced
+in ecstasy.
+
+For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the
+prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,
+but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that
+Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time
+realizes as the Deed.  Man looks to the future and the coming of
+Eternity.  How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?
+Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_.  And if the
+high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the
+worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the
+dreamer and the dream are God.
+
+If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.
+There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins.  And thus the
+spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in
+defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.
+
+Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,
+flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn.  Man's
+spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an
+ever deeper reality.  The race, too, like the individual and the
+nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy.  Once more, in the way of a
+thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning
+manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless
+can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms
+of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back
+upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite
+through the finite.
+
+This mystic attribute, this _élan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship
+in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment.  It is,
+for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert,
+and Carlyle possess in common[8].  These men are not as others of their
+time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,
+whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.
+
+The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the
+Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of
+the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the
+monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,
+the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course
+curiously similar.  Flaubert has a wider range and more varied
+sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally
+surpasses him.  Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in
+ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the
+dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.
+
+The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage
+from the _Correspondance_ of Flaubert in his first manhood.  In Saint
+Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as
+Carlyle found in Cromwell.  To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to
+that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of
+time?  Man's path is to the Eternal--_dem Grabe hinan_--and from the
+study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same
+embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."
+
+And if, in such later works as Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ and the
+_Latter-Day Pamphlets_ of Carlyle, only the difference between the two
+minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in
+temperament.  It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the
+artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
+
+The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the
+same--the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite
+and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the
+transient.  Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with
+which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of
+modern science and mechanical invention.  But whether surveyed with
+contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an
+unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the
+same--"the eternities, the immensities."[9]
+
+And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of
+Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies.  Love's mystery is
+deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch
+by the breath of the grave.  The desire of the infinite greatens the
+beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural
+radiance.  All knowledge there becomes wonder.  Truth is not known, but
+the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with
+it eternally.
+
+Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists,
+formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the
+worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of
+the infinite.  The achievements in art most distinctive of the present
+age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim
+the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the
+immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,
+the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of
+unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the
+retina of the eye.  "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw
+a line," said Hokousai.  It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to
+create a world."
+
+The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift
+influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply
+defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be
+hard to over-estimate.  The nation undowered with such an ideal,
+menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a
+protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in
+the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and
+commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.
+
+But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics
+from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public
+affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their
+characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell.  For
+not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this
+conception robed in something of its initial wonder.  These, the
+individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,
+aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.
+
+And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the
+divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism
+itself.  Life is greatened.  The ardour of the periods of history most
+memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the
+energy of the Renaissance.  A higher mood than that of the England of
+Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day.  Man's true peace is
+not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a
+work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to
+the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion
+of the world, but of God.
+
+Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,
+one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"
+in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than
+auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men?  As Puritanism
+seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of
+the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.
+Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the
+"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and
+Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,
+wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that
+passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.
+
+
+
+§ 5.  THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+
+Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above
+speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the
+soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist.  It is an
+affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,
+the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts
+of men.  "Im Anfang war die That."  The "deed" is nearer the eternal
+fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that
+work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in
+this or that deed.  In painting, that impressionism which loves the
+line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its
+emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine
+thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter
+flows.  A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's
+lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into
+living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from
+which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's
+ecstasy or mystery derives.
+
+In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always
+been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure.  Indefiniteness is far from
+proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal.  "A
+man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know
+whither he is going."  What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours
+of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man
+and the limited, precise ends of common days.  Upon such a subject
+Cromwell has the right to speak.  Great himself, he was the cause of
+the greatness that was in others.  But in all things it was still
+Jehovah that worked in him.  Deeply penetrated with this belief,
+Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his
+thought.  Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.
+
+Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in
+the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free.  The
+conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the
+world.  The individual will stands aside.  The Will of the universe
+advances.  Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark
+background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in
+mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings
+to this high, dread, and austere power.
+
+So of empires, of races, and of nations.  A race never goes so far as
+when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the
+consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little
+way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final
+task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.
+Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of
+the divine purposes.  It is the identity of the desire of the race with
+the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the
+motion of tides and of planets.
+
+
+Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of
+the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those
+empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw
+ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to
+live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black
+portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within
+the mind?  Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the
+amphitheatre of Rome?
+
+Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and
+public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated
+through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is
+enacted.  Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a
+vast amphitheatre?  And towards the mortal arena the empires of the
+world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful
+throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,
+the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's
+chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon.  And their resolution,
+serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,
+imperator, morituri te salutant!  Hail, Caesar, those about to die
+salute thee!"
+
+And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within
+its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed
+mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,
+deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the
+funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead
+yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,
+laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence
+sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.
+
+
+
+§ 6.  BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE
+OF THE PRESENT
+
+Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for
+another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have
+striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of
+Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny.  Fixed in her resolve, the
+will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course?  The narrow
+space of the path in front of her that is discernible even
+dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?
+
+Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a
+principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of
+Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of
+conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict.  The
+scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but
+the pragmatic expression of this mystery.  Here is the metaphysical
+basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in
+human art, in human action.  And thus that law, which, as I pointed
+out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in
+the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in
+interpreting the last transformation of all.
+
+The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the
+domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial
+Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of
+the idea incarnate in Hellas.
+
+The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as
+the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished
+systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons.  But the
+Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished
+races and through vanished universes.
+
+Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations
+undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the
+foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly
+imagined.  For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no
+altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater
+than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat.  Throughout her
+bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the
+village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall
+find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,
+and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil
+his being's supreme law.
+
+The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the
+summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the
+paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.
+Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind.  And thus Britain
+shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,
+the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.
+
+Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of
+religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is
+compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,
+in social institutions.  Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.
+
+Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the
+Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this
+ever more clearly.  Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the
+Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius.  In the
+fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less
+divinely missioned than the Hebrew.  Though contemporary of the
+generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an
+Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of
+light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source
+and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe
+itself, and all the desires of men.  In an age which silenced the
+scholastics he founded Hell in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a
+traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the
+great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on
+his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab
+poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.
+
+What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the
+wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that
+already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner
+music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great
+Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the
+achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious
+cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the
+mind of man?
+
+And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought
+of Dante's!  No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which
+is based on religion.  Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,
+all break before its presence.  What a light is cast upon the deeper
+places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the
+seventeenth century!  Genius for religion is rare as other forms of
+genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the
+State its rank is primary.  In the soul, religion marks the meridian of
+the divine.  By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of
+all else in life is tested.  And there is nothing which a race will not
+more willingly surrender than its religion.  The race which changes its
+religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and
+ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience
+or neglectful by despair.
+
+In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present
+attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent
+humanity.  She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with
+sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others.  And confronting her
+at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of
+Akbar, and more auspicious.  Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and
+worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design.  The forms,
+the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no
+integral part of that religion's life.  Even when by the progress of
+the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which
+time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are
+cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.
+But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of
+its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes--these are beyond the
+touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man.  Inseparable
+from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life
+changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine
+whence they came.  The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away
+the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized
+around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its
+loveliness.  Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,
+the _idea_ enshrined in the Athênê of Phidias, the immortal cause of
+its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought
+immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.
+
+But a greater task awaits Britain.  Among the races of the earth whose
+fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent
+upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain
+that harmony which Dante discerned?  What empire, disregarding the
+mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,
+institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by
+inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly
+opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing
+all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,
+institutions, rites, and creeds?  Nature and the dead shall lend their
+unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes!  Thus will Britain turn to
+the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the
+religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.
+
+The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed
+from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the
+artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening
+intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing.  Man grows
+conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the
+round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to
+be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the
+Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task
+exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde
+"patriotism"?  For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,
+hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more
+impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.
+This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is
+already by her past committed.  The task is great, for between
+civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity,
+suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying.  From this the Greek division
+of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it
+possesses.
+
+In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the
+subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and
+religions of the world, the short space that is illumined of the path
+in front of Britain does unmistakably lead.  Every year, every month
+that passes, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny
+which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race.  The actions, the
+purposes of other empires and races, seem but to illustrate the
+actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its
+relations to Humanity.
+
+Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall,
+it will at least be as that hero of the _Iliad_ fell, "doing some
+memorable thing."  Were not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to
+incur the taunt, _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_, or that cast
+by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," _a
+Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui_, "hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God"?  The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and
+by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst,
+in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in
+suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in
+triumph or defeat, to eternity.
+
+There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember
+the dead.  Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much
+things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought
+of every hour.  In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest
+counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing
+eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are
+not yet.  Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or
+statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died,
+and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned
+that they laid the foundations of this Empire.  Masters of their own
+fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges
+unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or
+possessors.  But they set higher store on glory than on life, and
+valued great deeds above length of days.  They loved their country,
+dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for
+that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of
+the divine within such life, that they fought and fell.  And this great
+inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief
+inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.
+
+And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise,
+and with phantom fingers beckon England on!  From the fields of their
+fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort
+arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour.  And lo!
+gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call,
+clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of
+hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other
+wars--Brunanburh and Senlac, Creçy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.
+_Their_ battle-cries await our answer--the chivalry's at Agincourt,
+"Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout,
+which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts!  The Lord of
+Hosts!"--these await our answer, that response which by this war we at
+last send ringing down the ages, "God for Britain, Justice and Freedom
+to the world!"
+
+
+Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a
+challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the
+future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our
+race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so
+remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.
+
+With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this
+generation.  Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more
+imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this
+nation and to this people.  And, again, if we should hesitate, or if we
+should decide wrongly, it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the
+narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead and the
+despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to
+us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.
+
+
+
+[1] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta
+idea" and the "inadequat[oe] idea"; but the distinction above flows
+from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not
+Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.
+
+[2] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht;
+    Der Herr der Schöpfung hat alles bedacht.
+    Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,
+    Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.
+          GOETHE, _West-östlicher Divan, Buch der Sprüche_.
+
+[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic
+Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan
+Arabia.  "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which
+Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the
+eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam
+offers a fair field for speculative politics.
+
+[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of
+this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into
+a mockery.  (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and
+Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)
+
+[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest
+works of its class in French literature.  Turgot's was one of those
+minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter
+bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.  The fogs and mists
+of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed
+out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot.  And a fragment written by Turgot
+in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title
+of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.
+
+[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary
+principles abound in Goethe's writings.  The violence of the first
+impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a
+climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories
+of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in
+his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a
+large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of
+Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to
+German politics and to the War of Liberation.  Even of 1809, the year
+of Eckmühl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German
+freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful
+returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"
+and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought
+quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
+
+[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a
+taillé un camée littéraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi
+rigoureuse perfection de forme."
+
+[8] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived
+through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of
+the other's work.  Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.
+Indeed _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, though read by a few, was
+practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date
+when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more
+detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to
+Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness.  Schopenhauer, on the
+other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's
+essays on German literature in the _Edinburgh_, and though ignorant as
+yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of
+English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.
+But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's
+teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the
+opportunity often presents itself.  Wagner, it is known, was a student
+both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle.  Schopenhauer's proud injunction,
+indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare
+himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine
+wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher
+teaching of Wagner, and--though in a less degree--of Carlyle.
+
+[9] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative
+rather than on artistic sympathy.  The Russian indeed never quite
+understood Flaubert's "rage for the word."  Yet the deep inner concord
+of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence.  It was the
+supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet
+was the friendship of his earlier years.  Yet they met seldom, and
+their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as
+described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after
+some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening
+would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht,
+Alfred."  It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the
+dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is
+darkly shadowed.  The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive
+to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of
+travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of
+its unending rest.
+
+[10] Cf. Philostratus, _Life of Appollonius_.  I. 28.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the _Daily
+News_ Special Number for December 31st, 1900.  In it he presents a
+survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during
+the nineteenth century.  He outlines the development of the New German
+Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and
+Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of
+Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present
+death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe.  The future
+_rôles_ of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the
+author.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+I
+
+DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+
+In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody close, and the fury
+of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a
+time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as
+now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the
+determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half
+regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once
+fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then,
+as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question
+whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century,
+pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny
+there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally
+arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that
+the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half
+its course to the Mohammedan.  Yet in one deep enough matter the mood
+of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe
+of 1900.  Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation
+between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise
+moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in
+1800 was radiantly clear to all men--the glory and the wonder, the
+endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century
+and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity.  The
+desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was
+in sight.  The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, "Bliss was it in
+that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine
+was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:
+
+  Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,
+  Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
+  Wandelt, Brüder, eure Bahn,
+  Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,
+
+and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of
+victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired
+of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of
+Poland, and the Russian steppes.  Since those days three generations
+have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and passed to their rest,
+and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century
+and the long vista of its years!  Man presents himself no more as he
+was delineated by the poets of 1800.  Not now does man appear to the
+poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like
+some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted
+minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself
+like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink
+of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of
+the worlds.  From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the
+great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe?  Whither are
+vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened?  Is it final
+despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary
+eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit
+of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring,
+wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789,
+of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?
+
+In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit
+valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in
+every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and
+personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable.  That word was
+"Freedom"--freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the
+thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of
+principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the
+negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating;
+freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of
+Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman;
+to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom
+to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic
+injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs
+of the elder centuries!  A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,
+that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and
+sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself
+to the world.  But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived
+in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest
+this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol
+and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream.  Therefore, he spoke
+the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,
+straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or
+boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte."  Since the death of Mohammed,
+no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and
+aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.
+Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the
+first year of the century dedicates to him his _Génie du
+Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, most
+deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.
+And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name
+"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest
+achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the
+Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired.  In that year, at Weimar,
+Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been
+in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the
+disdain of the greater poet.  Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even
+then the spell of Napoleon's name.  And in that year, the greatest of
+English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,
+with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,
+the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's
+allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in
+Europe and in the world.  To the calmer devotion of genius was added
+the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.
+And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself
+capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an
+energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the
+prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of
+Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an
+imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from
+a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own
+heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all
+around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the
+Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his
+youth upwards.  Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and
+Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly
+gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of
+his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.
+If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the
+victor, it was but for a moment.  In the universal horror and joy with
+which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure
+of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men
+felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up
+inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new
+world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.
+
+The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive
+transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched.  In the gradual
+declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the
+warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word
+travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or
+solicitude which marks the closing years of the century.  The first
+disillusionment came swiftly.  Fifteen years pass, years of war and
+convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth
+century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those
+fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the
+aspirations of men!  The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor
+Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race.  France, the
+world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the
+armies of Europe, risen in arms against her!  Emperors and kings,
+nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers
+like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Körner, warriors like Kutusov,
+Blücher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments
+of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities
+and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in
+this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and
+one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!
+
+What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon?  What marvel
+that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other
+of modern ages.  Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France
+false to the Revolution.  Man's action at its highest is, like his art,
+symbolic.  To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of
+a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall
+of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty.  To the Europe
+of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the
+princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into
+the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille
+to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,
+injustice and tyranny.  And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,
+the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the
+tyrants the hosts of the free.  What were his own despotisms, his own
+rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouché, the stifled Press, the
+_guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary
+war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the
+necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and
+felicity of the centuries to come?  Napoleon at the height of Imperial
+power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions
+unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.
+"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred
+years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can
+now be trusted to their own guidance."  The hour of his death, whether
+by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the
+hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart.  That hour of
+penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into
+the silence and the darkness.  Napoleon, trusting to the word and to
+the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed
+star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels.  But at the outset he
+has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits
+of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,
+its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats.  Yet it is
+in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of
+Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful
+resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland.  Then, turning to the
+West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,
+and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,
+and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end
+there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination.  The
+Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed
+suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against
+its liberators!  But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,
+calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of
+Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian
+Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe
+against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.
+
+Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most
+ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants
+of Francis II or Frederick William III.  At Vienna the gaily-plumaged
+diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of
+unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the
+most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the
+fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the
+Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the
+lingering anguish of Prometheus.  And if not one man of supreme genius
+then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of
+that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made
+themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what
+two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their
+hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no
+more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;
+that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can
+never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
+
+The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the
+abdication at the Elysée is a conflict between the two principles of
+Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for
+constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and
+the watchword of Humanity.  In theory the divine right of peoples was
+arrayed against the divine right of kings.  The conflict was waged
+bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle.  The dungeon, the
+torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or
+Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the
+weapons of the tyrants.  The secret society, the Marianne, the
+Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or
+transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,
+Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to
+Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon.  And in
+this singular conflict, what leaders!  In Spain, the heroic Juan
+Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Görres, the morning-star of
+political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and
+the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause.  It was
+not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the
+possibility of united action.  Opposed to these were the united
+purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression
+of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the
+great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller
+principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,
+Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena.  To this war against Liberty the Czar
+Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Krüdener's phrase, had
+struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity
+of a crusade.  From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of
+the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel
+the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous
+despotism.
+
+In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the
+place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.
+"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to
+be the enemy of the Revolution."  Nature, indeed, and the environment
+of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.
+Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a
+heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high
+with any generous impulse.  He was hostile to nobility of thought,
+action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a
+living satire upon himself, his life, his aims.  He despised history,
+for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.
+But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,
+and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a
+thoughtful mind.  Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and
+interminable _billets-doux_ written between sentences of death, exile,
+the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip
+II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding
+the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and
+espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western
+world.  There was nothing in him that was great.  But he was
+indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years.  Nesselrode,
+Hardenberg, Talleyrand even--whose Memoirs seem the work of genius
+beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's--found their
+designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy.  Congress
+after Congress--Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona--exhibited
+his triumph to Europe.  At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to
+the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the
+Empire, was dictated by Metternich--"Hold fast by what is old, for that
+alone is good.  If our forefathers found in this the true path, why
+should we seek another?  New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles
+which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.
+Beware of such ideas!  It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of
+loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal
+subjects to me.  See that you fulfil this task!"  Is there in human
+history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom
+or foresight of him who penned it?  It were an insult to the great
+Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian.  Yet they
+succeeded.  The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity
+was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times
+had not yet arisen.  Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire
+lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain?  Has all the blood from
+Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain?  Hard
+on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe
+the message that Napoleon was dead.  "It is not an event," said
+Talleyrand, "but a piece of news."  The remark was just.  Europe seemed
+now one vast Sainte Hélène, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all
+hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished.  The solitary grave at
+Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a
+cause for ever lost.
+
+The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance.  Heine's
+letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three
+Days awakened.  "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Marseillaise_!" he
+writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"
+reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize
+again the sacred weapons.  Bring flowers!  I will crown my head for the
+fight of death.  Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,
+words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and
+illumine the cabins of the poor."  But when Lafayette presented to
+France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton
+umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
+Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when
+Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the
+struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.
+France herself was weary of the illusion.  "We had need of a sword," a
+Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears."  The taunt was as
+foolish as it was unjust.  France assuredly had done her part in the
+war for Liberty.  The hour had come for the States of Europe to work
+out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,
+a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,
+and Metternich.
+
+Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more
+limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of
+the world.  Other despots died--Alexander I in 1825, the two
+Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and
+Frederick William III in 1840.  Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,
+Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on--"the gods," as
+Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."
+The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric
+he had reared.  From Guizot and his master he found but little
+resistance.  The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian
+system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little
+resistance as the France of Guizot.  Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion
+of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of
+his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of
+Europe than the march of an army.
+
+
+
+II
+
+NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+
+In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is
+endless and unresting.  The moment of collision between an old and a
+new principle of human action is a revolution.  Such a turning-point is
+the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848.  Two
+forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet
+indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed
+to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the
+principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under
+various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces
+of the present age.  The freedom of the nation was the form into which
+the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled.  Saint-Simonianism
+preserved for a time the old tradition.  But the devotees of
+Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after
+anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of
+Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,
+and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,
+but for France, for Germany, or for Italy.  Patriotism was taking the
+place of Humanism.
+
+To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism
+throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the
+astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the
+Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the
+Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all
+Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of
+the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or
+even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792.  Louis Napoleon,
+entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put
+it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason
+of Gorgei, the _coup d'état_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy
+imaginings.  Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the
+change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the
+_Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_.  For the principle of
+Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the
+second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German
+Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more
+potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century.
+It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave
+the volumes of Palacky's _History of Bohemia_ a power like that of a
+war-song.  Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of
+Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its
+course in Hungary to a glorious close--the Magyar nation.  Even in
+Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of
+Pan-Slavism, which the war of 1878--the Schipka Pass, Plevna, the
+dazzling heroism of Skobeleff--has made memorable.  In the triumph of
+this same principle lies the future hope of Spain.  Spain has been
+exhausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist intrigue, by the
+arrogance of successive dictators, and by the bloody reprisals of
+faction; she has lost the last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso
+XIII fate seems to reserve the task of completing again by mutual
+resignation that union with Portugal of which Castelar indicated the
+basis--a common blood and language, the common graves which are their
+ancient battle-fields, and the common wars against the Moslem, which
+are their glory.
+
+With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great
+principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of
+the European stage.  This is the principle whose votaries confronted
+Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.
+The famous sentence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its
+touch of sentimentality marking the distinction between September,
+1792, and February, 1848, "The tricolour has made the tour of the
+world; the red flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been turned
+into derision by subsequent events.  The red flag has made the tour of
+the world as effectively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte.
+The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism--for all four,
+however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue,
+spring from a common root--have been variously ascribed in France to
+the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels,
+Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which
+arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the
+broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.
+But the principle which informs alike the writings of individual
+thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar force in the first
+half of the century from the doctrines and teachings of Fichte and
+Schleiermacher, is but the principle to which in all ages suffering and
+wrong have made their vain appeal--the responsibility of all for the
+misery of the many and the enduring tyranny of the few.  Indignant at
+the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia applies his destructive
+criticism to all institutions, civil, religious, political, and finding
+all hollow, seeks to overwhelm all in one common ruin.  The
+Emancipation of 1861 was to the Nihilist but the act of Tyranny veiling
+itself as Justice.  It left the serf, brutalized by centuries of
+oppression, even more completely than before to the mercy of the boyard
+and the exploiters of human souls.  Michel Bakounine, Kropotkine,
+Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the
+signal to the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisations of
+Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and for a time, indeed,
+Bazaroffism was in literary jargon the equivalent of Nihilism.  If at
+intervals in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at some new
+crime, attempted or successful, of Anarchy, if Europe notes the
+singular regularity with which the crime is traced to Italy, and is
+perplexed at the absence of all the usual characteristics of conspiracy
+against society--for what known motives of human action, vanity or
+fear, hope or the gratification of revenge, can explain the silence of
+the confederates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the agents of
+his will?--if Europe is perplexed at this apparition of a terror
+unknown to the ancient world, the Italian sees in it but the operation
+of the law of responsibility.  To the nameless sufferings of Italy he
+ascribes the temper which leads to the mania of the anarchist; and the
+sufferings of Italy in their morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal
+of Italy by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and supremely in
+1856.  As Europe has grown more conscious of its essential unity as one
+State system, diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as the
+Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic appeal to the equality
+of kings, to the derisive theory of the Concert of Europe.  But
+Communism and Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of Europe
+more convincing and more terrible, and full of sinister presage to the
+future.
+
+A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Socialism.  Karl Marx may be
+regarded as the chief exponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or
+international Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual founder of the
+national or Democratic Socialism of Germany.  Marx, whose countenance
+with its curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velasquez,
+Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out as the apostle and avenger
+of human degradation and human suffering, published the first sketch of
+his principles in 1847, but more completely in the manifesto adopted by
+the Paris Commune in 1849.  As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced
+to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in
+wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau _père_, so the
+new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has
+its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new
+aristocracy, the _bourgeoisie_.  Factory owners and millionaires have
+taken the place of the _noblesse_ of last century.  And the sufferings
+of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with
+their numbers.  Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires.
+Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own
+wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by
+which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of
+their own despair.
+
+Marx's greatest work, _Das Kapital_, published in 1867, was to the new
+revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the _Contrat Social_
+of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89.  The brilliant genius of
+Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and
+ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature
+of Marx was repelled by these principles.  It was this trait in his
+writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul and his faith in the
+Prussian peasant and the Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time
+the interest of Bismarck.  Even a State such as Austria Lassalle
+regarded as higher than any federal union whatever.  The image of
+Lassalle's character, his philosophy, and too swift career, may be
+found in his earliest work, _Heracleitus_, the god-gifted statesman
+whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, but realizing his life in
+that of others, toiling ceaselessly for the oppressed, the dumb,
+helpless, leaderless masses who suffer silently, yet know not why they
+suffer.  A monarchy resting upon the support of the artisan-myriads
+against the arrogance of the _bourgeois_, as the Tudor monarchy rested
+upon the support of the yeomen and the towns against the arrogance of
+the feudal barons--this, in the most effective period of his career,
+was Lassalle's ideal State.  And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply
+to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly been
+characterized as the charter of the whole movement of democratic
+socialism in Germany down to the present hour.
+
+The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European Liberalism a more
+formidable adversary than Metternich.  The youth of Nicholas I had been
+formed by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the Czar
+Alexander.  The Princess Lieven and his mother, Maria Federovna, the
+friend of Stein, and the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in him
+a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and unwearied.  A resolute will,
+dauntless courage, a love of the beautiful in nature and in art, a
+high-souled enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the
+fate-appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies.  The Teuton in
+his blood effaced the Slav, and the fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of
+one sole purpose gives his career something of the tragic unity of
+Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of the Russian
+autocrat.  One God, one law, one Church, one State, Russian in
+language, Russian in creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of
+its civic, military, and municipal life--this was the dream to the
+realization of which the thirty crowded years of his reign were
+consecrated.  There is grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the
+manner in which he encounters and quells the insurrection of the 26th
+December.  Then, true to the immemorial example of tyrants, he found
+employment for sedition in war.  He tore from Persia in a single
+campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 20,000,000 roubles.
+The mystic Liberalism of Alexander was abandoned.  The free
+constitution of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old Russian
+party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as distinct from a German, policy
+was welcomed with surprise and tumultuous delight.  "Despotism," he
+declared, "is the principle of my government; my people desires no
+other."  Yet he endeavoured to win young Russia by flattery, as he had
+conquered old Russia by reaction.  He encouraged the movement in poetry
+against the tasteless imitation of Western models, and in society
+against the dominance of the French language.  In the first years of
+his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary expression, and
+Russian prose and Russian verse acquire their own cadences.  Yet
+liberty is the life-blood of art; and liberty he could not grant.  The
+freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of speech forbidden, and
+a strict censorship, exercised by the dullest of officials, stifled
+literature.  "How unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked when
+Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of his dungeon, "all his
+prisoners die on his hands."  How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas!
+All his men of genius died by violent deaths.  Lermontoff and Poushkine
+fell in duels before antagonists who represented the _tchinovnik_
+class.  Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiédov was assassinated at
+Teheran.
+
+His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great--the
+restoration of the Byzantine Empire.  Making admirable use of the
+Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at
+Navarino.  Thus popular at home and abroad, regarded by the Liberals of
+Europe as the restorer of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a
+stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to crush the Poles.
+Enthusiastic Berlin students carried the effigies of Polish leaders in
+triumph; but not a sword was drawn.  England, France, Austria looked on
+silent at the work of Diebitch and Paskievitch, "my two mastiffs," as
+the Czar styled them, and the true "_finis Poloniae_" had come.  A
+Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the
+extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot.  Yet his
+European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his
+crowning chance--the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes
+represented Liberty and the Revolution.  Every force that personal
+rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that
+reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the
+efforts of the monarch in this enterprise.  The disaster was sudden,
+overwhelming, irremediable.  Yet in one thing his life was a success,
+and that a great one--he had Russianised Russia.
+
+The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only
+less significant than the Revolution of 1848.  The isolating force of
+religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East
+upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy.  The hopes of the
+Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria,
+deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the
+Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed
+Hungary.  From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour
+seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his
+name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time.
+The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the
+designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were
+checked.  Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz
+and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor
+Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy.  Thirty years have passed since
+the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices
+which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a
+conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens
+which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and
+after Rossbach.  But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa;
+instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who
+make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious
+peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the
+past.  This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in
+disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but
+there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength
+made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and
+example of a single man--Giuseppe Mazzini.  To modern Republicanism,
+not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a
+watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world.  Equal rights
+mean equal duties.  The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man.  He
+taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not
+in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of
+those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the
+path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by
+side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by
+establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.
+
+The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation
+against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520.
+The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in
+efforts to invent a constitution like that of England.  It was the
+happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of
+1688 and the pupils of Siéyès.  Heine's bitter address to Germany,
+"Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which
+every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Würtemberger, or Rheinlander
+felt not less deeply.  The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but
+it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper
+perception of the aspiration of all Germany.  Which of the multifarious
+kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or
+imperial?  Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her
+tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been
+the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn.  The Danubian
+principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the
+future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost.  Prussia
+alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Blücher,
+of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was
+essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope
+of religious tolerance.  After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue
+north of the Alps was inevitable.  The question was how and in what
+shape the end would realize itself.  Montesquieu insists that, even
+without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment
+of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate.  Yet, with data
+before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire
+without Bismarck.  His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through
+the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary
+period.  His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose
+of Frederick William IV.  His diplomacy led to Königgrätz, and the
+manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a
+call to battle.  And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian
+legions in the field.  From his first definite entry into a State
+career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and
+simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour
+of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian.  From the Hohenzollern he looked
+for no gratitude.  His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the
+individual.  He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the
+value of the word of a King.  False or true to all men else, he was
+unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to
+himself, true to God.  He could not bequeath his secret to those who
+came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to
+Luini.  But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance.  It
+possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a
+common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph.
+Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to
+Bavaria.  Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War,
+Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing
+ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan.  The new Empire, whether it be to Europe
+a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against
+Ultramontanism.
+
+The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian
+alliance.  Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann.
+Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the
+alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century
+began?  It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled
+Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power
+can avert.  Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long,
+terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole
+Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder.  No man's home is a
+home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the
+'_Drang nach Osten_' turned back for ever."
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+
+In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or
+accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion.  The nineteenth
+century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the
+overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been
+characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry.
+Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the
+imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his
+intelligence, has had in this age its adherents.  The Papacy in each
+successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude.
+Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to
+escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence
+and the perfection of Nature.  Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like
+musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the
+world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch
+to his doom.  Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and
+the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by
+the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the
+thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French
+_littérateurs_.  The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this
+movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the
+Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and
+Chateaubriand.  Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of
+Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme
+literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.
+Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the
+war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its
+forms.  Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded
+beyond imagination's wing.  Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the
+infinite solitudes of space.  The theory of evolution stirred the
+common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till
+then to the studious calm of the few.  The ardour to know all, to be
+all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century
+had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty
+of man, and surprise has followed surprise.  The aspirations of the
+Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its
+sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle
+Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased
+facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living
+impulse.  As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,
+and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower
+of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one.  The bounds
+of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and
+surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the
+Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the
+soul.
+
+That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the
+nineteenth century from preceding  centuries--the  gradually
+increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has
+strengthened this impression.  An age mystic in its religion, symbolic
+in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an
+age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.
+Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of
+thrones, turned to the East and found peace.  What were the armies of
+Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Háfiz and Sádi, and to the
+calm of the trackless centuries far behind?  The mood of Goethe has
+become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of
+the century's end.  The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole
+position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany.
+The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as
+vividly as the oldest, Italy and France.  It controls the meditative
+depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's
+dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert.  It informs the teaching of
+Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky.  Goethe, at the beginning
+of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of
+Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has
+woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the
+Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a
+rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of
+Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the
+Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of
+painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
+
+What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze!  The ideal of
+Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins
+Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some
+profounder mystery, some mightier destiny.  More than any race known to
+history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other
+thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his
+own spirit.  The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of
+Wagner attest this.  Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,
+of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.
+Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably.  But the purple
+fringe of another dawn is on the horizon.  Teutonic heroism and
+resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the
+ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty
+calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of
+men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends.  What vistas
+arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this
+union!  The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an
+accomplished hope clearly defined.  The last sun of the dying century
+goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an
+ideal it but darkly discerns.
+
+
+
+
+
+GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.
+
+
+
+
+
+Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.
+
+
+  TREITSCHKE          BERNHARDI
+  EXPOUNDED           EXPLAINED
+
+
+GERMANY AND ENGLAND
+
+By Professor Cramb.
+
+With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction by the Hon. Joseph
+Choate.
+
+LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the
+present crisis will read this book.  There are in it things which will
+cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to
+the war so clearly set forth."
+
+MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its
+clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its
+broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the
+occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."
+
+The _Times_ says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with
+all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly
+grateful."
+
+The _Spectator_ says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for
+themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the
+German Imperialism.  They will learn in the smallest possible space
+what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."
+
+
+
+
+Three Important Works
+
+
+THE GERMAN WAR BOOK
+
+Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of
+the German Army.
+
+Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H.  MORGAN, M.A.
+
+Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late
+Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct
+and its Legal Results."
+
+_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
+
+This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General
+Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the
+conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies,
+neutrals, hostages.  Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.
+
+
+FRANCE IN DANGER
+
+By PAUL VERGNET.  Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.
+
+_Crown 8vo.  2s. 6d. net._
+
+Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what
+Professor Cramb did for England.  After a careful study of the
+Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his
+countrymen that War was imminent.  His aspect of the question has never
+been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought
+to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great
+War.
+
+
+WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS
+
+Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency
+legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the
+Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War
+on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on
+Commercial Relations.
+
+By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.
+
+_Crown 8vo._
+
+
+IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR
+
+A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES
+
+By E. B. MITCHELL.
+
+_With Map.  Crown 8vo._
+
+This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of
+things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14,
+at the end of the great rush.  The writer, who is neither a summer
+visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant,
+had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city
+and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is
+neither all gloom nor all brightness.  At the present time, when the
+War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a
+disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and
+timely.
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial
+Britain, by J. A. Cramb
+
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+The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain,
+by J. A. Cramb
+</TITLE>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain, by 
+J. A. Cramb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
+       Nineteenth Century Europe
+
+Author: J. A. Cramb
+
+Release Date: December 19, 2009 [EBook #30710]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIGINS, DESTINY--IMPERIAL BRITAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+[Transcriber's note: transliterated Greek is surrounded by plus signs,
+e.g. "+agôníai+".]
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="J. A. Cramb" BORDER="2" WIDTH="334" HEIGHT="455">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 334px">
+J. A. Cramb
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THE
+<BR>
+ORIGINS AND DESTINY
+</H1>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY THE LATE
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+J. A. CRAMB, M.A.
+</H2>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+LONDON:
+<BR>
+JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+<BR>
+1915
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H6 ALIGN="center">
+<I>All rights reserved</I>
+</H6>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-000v"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-000v.jpg" ALT="Greek text" BORDER="" WIDTH="433" HEIGHT="143">
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I determine and
+deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and force enough to draw
+the mindes both of young and olde to the diligent reading and digesting
+of these labours.  For what man is there so despising knowledge, or any
+so idle and slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what
+policies or by what kinde of government the most part of nations in the
+universall world were vanquished, subdued and made subject unto the one
+empire of the Romanes, which before that time was never seen or heard?
+Or who is there that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or
+studie, that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value or
+worthy to be esteemed before this?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>The Histories of the most famous Chronographer</I>, POLYBIUS.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568).
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PREFACE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in
+May, June, and July, 1900.  Their immediate inspiration was the war in
+South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in
+these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the
+ideals and deeds of the present hour.  When the book first appeared,
+Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections
+by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might
+not be without service to his country."  In the same hope his lectures
+are now reprinted.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May,
+1862.  On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he
+graduated in 1885, taking 1st Class Honours in Classics.  In the same
+year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature.  He
+also studied at Bonn University.  He subsequently travelled on the
+Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.
+Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son.  From 1888 to
+1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College,
+Glasgow.  Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to
+the <I>Dictionary of National Biography</I>, and also occasional reviews to
+periodicals.  For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service
+Commission.  In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of
+Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his
+death.  He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the
+Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres.  In
+London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.
+His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913,
+the subject being the relations between England and Germany.  In
+response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures
+for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+<BR><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap01">LECTURE I</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+SECTION
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+<BR>
+1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+<BR>
+2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+<BR>
+3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap02">LECTURE II</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+<BR>
+1. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+<BR>
+2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+<BR>
+3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap03">LECTURE III</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+<BR>
+1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+<BR>
+2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+<BR>
+3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+<BR>
+4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+<BR>
+5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+<BR><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap04">LECTURE IV</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+<BR>
+1. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+<BR>
+2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+<BR>
+3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+<BR>
+4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+<BR>
+5. MILITARISM
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap05">LECTURE V</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT IS WAR?
+<BR>
+1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+<BR>
+2. DEFINITION OF WAR
+<BR>
+3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+<BR>
+4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+<BR>
+5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+<BR>
+6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+<BR>
+7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap06">LECTURE VI</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+<BR>
+1. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+<BR>
+2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+<BR>
+3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+<BR>
+4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+<BR>
+5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap07">LECTURE VII</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+<BR>
+1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+<BR>
+2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
+<BR>
+3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY
+<BR>
+4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+<BR>
+5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+<BR>
+6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">MANDATE OF THE PRESENT</SPAN><BR>
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<A HREF="#chap08">NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+1. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+<BR>
+2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+<BR>
+3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART I
+<BR>
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+REFLECTIONS ON THE<BR>
+ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF<BR>
+IMPERIAL BRITAIN<BR>
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE I
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, May</I> 8<I>th</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
+impress on the traditions of humanity.  In no period has the burden of
+the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
+its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
+so monotonously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
+Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
+stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
+of a county, proceed to write the History of the World!  And in
+speculation it is the Tale, the <I>fabula</I>, the procession of impressive
+incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
+he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
+possesses.  But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
+age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
+mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
+which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
+mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
+endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
+results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
+caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
+the supreme instinct of this age&mdash;the ardour to know all, to experience
+all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
+things&mdash;if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
+with it silence and utter death.  The deepened significance of history
+springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
+our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
+present.  The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
+mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture&mdash;if these have
+become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
+Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
+that invests them with this magic.  Life has become more
+self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
+the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
+with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
+Timeless manifesting itself in Time.  And the distinguishing function
+of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
+bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
+discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
+and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
+whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
+French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
+only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
+subject, but attempted an answer to the question&mdash;What is the place of
+these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
+of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
+similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
+Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
+to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
+amongst the world-empires of the past.  I use the phrase "Imperial
+Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
+associations are inseparable.  It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
+the like.  But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
+spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
+has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
+material frame of empire.  With the rise of this spirit, this
+consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
+people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared.  The unity of
+Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
+achievement.  The aspirations of the period of the
+<I>Aufklärung</I>&mdash;Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte&mdash;find in this
+edifice their political realization.  But the incident is not
+unprecedented.  Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
+obsolete.  It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
+under Louis XIV affected it.  But in this unobserved, this silent
+growth of Imperial Britain&mdash;so unobserved that it presents itself even
+now as an unreal, a transient thing&mdash;a force intrudes into the
+State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
+upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
+has few, if any, parallels in history.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ I.  THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+What is the nature of this Consciousness?  What is its historical
+basis?  Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
+individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
+purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious.  Life's end is then
+manifest.  The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
+becomes the fixed law of existence.  Such moments inevitably are
+difficult to localize.  Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
+Robespierre&mdash;"He has so much of the future in his mind."  But it is
+neither Toulon, nor Vendémiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
+two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
+Napoleon to himself.  So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
+genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
+to France.  Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
+beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
+to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
+Thrasymene and Cannae.  It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
+the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
+The prose of Osorius[<A NAME="chap01fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn1">1</A>] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
+line.  Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
+world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
+traces.  But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
+necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
+Unconscious to the Conscious.  Similarly in the England of the
+seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
+master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation.  This is
+the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
+the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
+"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
+lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers.  It is the unifying
+motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century.  The
+eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing.  An ideal
+from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
+eighteenth century.  But from the closing years of the century to the
+present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
+with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
+origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
+impressing the whole earth by its majesty&mdash;the Ideal of Imperial
+Britain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
+beginnings of great movements in history.  Nevertheless it is often
+convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
+or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
+itself.  And if the question were asked&mdash;When does monarchical or
+constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
+I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
+patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
+hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
+further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
+speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
+select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
+Warren Hastings.  There this first awakening consciousness of an
+Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
+indeed.  Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
+of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow.  His conception of history
+at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
+school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus.  In religion he revered the
+traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time.  His
+literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
+Charles James Fox.  In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
+the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
+indifferent.  As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
+century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
+seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
+that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs.  But if
+his range was narrow, he is master there.  "Within that circle none
+durst walk but he."  No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
+rhetoric, a mightier language.  And if he is a reactionary in
+constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
+prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
+nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize&mdash;an empire resting not
+on violence, but on justice and freedom.  This ideal influences the
+action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
+its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
+from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke.  And in the
+seventeenth century, unless in a latent <I>unconscious</I> form, it can
+hardly be traced at all.  In the speculative politics of that century
+we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
+part.  I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
+of Cromwell as "a great Briton."  Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
+neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
+in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
+sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
+Imperial Britain.  His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
+of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
+not consciously, not deliberately.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
+influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
+than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
+us.  The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
+definitely, there lost in receding vistas.  On the battlefield or in
+the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
+is slowly elaborating itself.  And within the nation at large the ideal
+which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
+clearer consciousness.  Its influence throws a light upon the last
+speeches of the younger Pitt.  If the Impeachment be Burke's <I>chef
+d'oeuvre</I>, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
+ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
+Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
+pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[<A NAME="chap01fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn2">2</A>]  The ideal makes
+great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
+Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent.  "The Cry of
+the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
+after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
+the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
+Nile.  The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
+strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
+battle-cry of the "Rights of Man."  Thus has this ideal, grown
+conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life.  It
+removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
+they by being free may bring freedom to others.  In the great
+renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
+name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus.  It imparts to modern
+politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
+at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
+constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
+in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
+the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
+possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
+at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
+his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
+to frame an answer to the question&mdash;What is the nature of this ideal
+which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
+surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
+Scotland, and of Ireland?  Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
+transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
+is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
+Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
+of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte.  This is the ideal, and in the
+resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
+its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
+as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
+of Imperial Britain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
+his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
+with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
+sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task.  This is
+the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
+races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
+Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome.  To spread
+the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
+Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon.  Similarly of
+Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
+in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan.  And in
+this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
+necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
+lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
+The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
+examine in a later lecture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
+in a clearer light.  Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
+British.  It is not Roman, not Hellenic.  The Roman ideal moulds every
+form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
+East, down to the eighteenth century.  The theory of the mediaeval
+empire derives immediately from Rome.  The Roman justice disguised as
+righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial.  The
+Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
+that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
+<I>Paradiso</I>.[<A NAME="chap01fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn3">3</A>]  Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
+scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
+<I>imperium ac libertas</I> to a Roman historian.  The voluntary or
+accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
+which it popularized is worth considering.  It is false to the genius
+of Rome.  It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
+historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
+nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words.  <I>Imperium ac
+justitia</I> he might have said; but he could never have used together the
+conceptions of Empire and Freedom.  The peoples subdued by Rome&mdash;Spain,
+Gaul, Africa&mdash;received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
+Rome's name, deifying her genius.  But the ideal of Freedom, the
+freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
+highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
+statesman!  Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
+at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
+Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
+conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
+life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
+the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
+throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find.  The common
+traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
+of the <I>Aeneid</I> and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
+arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
+unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
+of the ancient State.  And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
+effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
+the most original and varied forms.  The power of the Roman ideal, on
+the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
+seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
+itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France.  Consider how completely the
+ideals of these States are enshrined in the <I>De Monarchia</I>, and how
+closely the <I>De Monarchia</I> knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
+Rome!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
+is tedious as a twice-told tale.  Her art, her palaces, are her own
+eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
+waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
+multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
+sky.  But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
+inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
+grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
+proffered by the visiting angel"&mdash;a Protestant Spain is impossible&mdash;but
+because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
+that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
+life&mdash;freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
+But disaster taught Spain nothing&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-016"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-016.jpg" ALT="Greek text" BORDER="" WIDTH="306" HEIGHT="80">
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Alas, for mortal history!  In happy fortune<BR>
+A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster<BR>
+A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;<BR>
+And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
+comment than the decline of Spain.[<A NAME="chap01fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn4">4</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
+of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
+bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
+Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
+before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull <I>Unigenitus</I>, the
+procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
+Révolution:&mdash;"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
+first amongst modern empires, completely breaks.  For it is a new
+empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
+moulded by a new ideal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me illustrate this by a contrast&mdash;a contrast between two armies and
+what each brings to the vanquished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
+army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
+That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
+legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
+behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
+Burgundy and Lorraine.  One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
+who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
+glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
+fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
+irresistible strength.  And to the Netherlands what does that army
+bring?  Death comes with it&mdash;death in the shape most calculated to
+break the resolution of the most dauntless&mdash;the rack, the solitary
+dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
+<I>auto-da-fé</I>, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
+of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals.  These
+things accompany the march of Alva.  And that army of ours which day by
+day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
+does that army portend?  That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
+dungeon, nor the dread <I>auto-da-fé</I>; it brings with it, and not to one
+people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
+the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
+ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
+generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
+generations of the past&mdash;an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
+prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "<I>élargissez Dieu!</I>"&mdash;to
+liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
+itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
+with the Divine.  And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
+coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
+consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
+designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
+pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
+whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
+some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
+issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
+and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
+conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
+this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
+the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
+for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
+humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
+distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
+has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
+the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
+The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
+experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
+to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
+the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
+Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
+root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race.  The former
+nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
+end.  It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
+not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
+natural presence.  Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
+condition of man's being.  In the ancient world, government ever tends
+to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
+that State is imperial.  In the modern, government with concrete
+justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
+of the State whose ideal is higher.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The vision of the <I>De Monarchia</I>&mdash;one God, one law, one creed, one
+emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in
+justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose
+imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur&mdash;does but
+describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon
+men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of
+Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of
+the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever
+eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual
+and melancholic.  Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into
+the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression
+in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"&mdash;"The State?  I am the State."  The
+ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme
+representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but
+from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the
+Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar."  That word
+thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God.
+It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the
+whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual.  Yet
+Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as
+strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries
+after that command was uttered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such then is the character of the ideal.  And in the resolution as a
+people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer
+all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of
+Imperial Britain.  None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen
+within the consciousness of a people.  And to England through all her
+territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now.  If ever
+there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the
+twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of
+its fate, it is NOW!  There is an Arab fable of the white steed of
+Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to
+every man, as to every people, comes <I>once</I>.  Glory to that man, to
+that race, who dares to mount it!  And that steed, is it not nearing
+England now?  Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on
+the blast!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great
+resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented
+themselves to men and to nations.  Even now they present themselves,
+manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to
+humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion
+of other States.  But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it
+alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every
+imperial race that History knows.  How shall any empire, any state,
+conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the
+individual&mdash;"In honour preferring one another"?  This in an imperial
+State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to
+swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered.  That
+pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony
+of Magersfontein.  For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month
+that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial
+Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South
+Africa.  If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all
+the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
+carry with it its own refutation.  There is a kind of tragic elevation
+in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
+Timour.  But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
+Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
+the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
+design thus base, ambition thus sordid?  And if we call to memory the
+dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
+us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
+traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
+dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus?  And in what cause have we died?"
+were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
+world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
+is for the mines, it is for the mines!"  No man can believe that; no
+man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night!  The
+imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck.  Great enterprises have
+ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
+seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities.  But to
+arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
+baser alloy?  To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
+long approved?  Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
+ideal&mdash;an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
+their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
+path of England now.  For this these men have died, from the first
+battle of the war to that fought yesterday.  And it is this knowledge,
+this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
+compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
+They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
+past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future.  They
+have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
+impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
+account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises!  But yesterday
+in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
+seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down
+upon the place of their rest.  For this ideal they have died&mdash;"in their
+youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
+spring from the year."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
+greet the great dead who fell in the old wars!  See, through the mists
+of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
+from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
+greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
+from their wounds!  Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
+disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
+at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
+have sent thither as the <I>avant-garde</I> of our faith, that in this cause
+is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn1text">1</A>] The Latin work of Osorius, <I>De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
+Lusitaniae</I>, appeared in 1574, two years later than <I>Os Lusiadas</I>.  The
+twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
+1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens.  But the
+hero of Osorius is Alboquerque.  His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
+literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
+of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
+with his eyes upon his subject.  Seven years after the Latin, a French
+translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
+published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
+others, bringing the history down to 1529.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn2text">2</A>] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
+April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
+Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
+afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
+Tuesday morning (April 3rd).  The close of the speech is thus reported:
+"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
+the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
+reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
+regret.  We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
+calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
+commerce.  We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
+in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
+blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure
+religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of
+that immense continent.  Then may we hope that even Africa, though last
+of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening
+of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon
+us in a much earlier period of the world.  Then also will Europe,
+participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample
+recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no
+longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the
+darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more
+speedily dispelled&mdash;
+<BR><BR>
+Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis,<BR>
+illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used
+with a different view&mdash;
+<BR><BR>
+His demum exactis&mdash;<BR>
+devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta<BR>
+fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas;<BR>
+largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit<BR>
+purpureo."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment
+remains, was delivered on April 27th (<I>Parl. Hist.</I> xxix, pp. 1134-88).
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn3text">3</A>] Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history
+of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the
+centuries which follow.  To Dante he represents at once the subtleties
+of Jurisprudence and Theology.  The Eagle's hymn in the <I>Paradiso</I>
+(Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and
+Mediaeval Imperialism.  The essence of the entire treatise <I>De
+Monarchia</I> is in these cantos; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person
+speaks, is informed by the same spirit.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn4text">4</A>] Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a
+further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of
+Spain.  Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single
+life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an
+empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in
+fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject
+State.  Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel,
+John III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe.
+But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry
+went hand in hand.  To the pride of her conquistadores was added the
+fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within
+the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
+administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
+incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa.  The
+resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
+the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
+certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
+themselves upon the mind.  And these distinctions mark the divergence
+between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
+designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
+Britain.  Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
+Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
+Dante.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE II
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, May</I> 15<I>th</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
+move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
+the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
+Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
+The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
+transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
+To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
+has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
+hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
+preliminary study.  Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
+but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
+instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
+generations.  But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
+a contemporary of the remotest ages.  The beam of light, however far
+into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
+sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
+whence he came.  As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
+Divine grows more, not less insistent.  Each moment indeed is rooted in
+the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
+comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
+memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
+itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
+Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
+sovereignty, as the eye is unmoved at the narrow bounds that hedge its
+vision, and finds peace where he would otherwise have found but despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Those affinities, those intimate relations of the past and present, are
+the basis of speculative politics.  A judgment upon a movement in the
+present, an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, a nation, or
+an empire will describe in the future, is of little value unless from a
+wide enough survey the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its
+support.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated above we have the ideal
+of a race destined to Empire, and at last across the centuries grown
+conscious of that destiny, the question confronts us&mdash;is it possible
+out of the past, not surveying it from the vantage-ground of the
+present merely, but as it were living into the present from the past,
+to foreshadow the rise of this consciousness?  Or turning back in the
+light of this consciousness to the past, is there offered by the past a
+justification of this interpretation of the present, of this movement
+styled "Imperialism"?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The heart of the matter lies in the transformation of mediaeval
+patriotism into modern imperialism, in the evolution or development
+which out of the Englishman of the earlier centuries has produced the
+Englishman of the present, moved by other and higher political ends.
+Is there any incident or series of incidents in our history, of
+magnitude enough profoundly to affect the national consciousness, to
+which we may look for the causes, or for the formative spirit, of this
+change?  And in their effect upon the national consciousness of Britain
+have these incidents followed any law traceable in other nations or
+empires?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ I.  OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+There is a kind of criticism directed against politics which, year by
+year or month by month, makes the discovery that between the code which
+regulates the action of States and the code which regulates the actions
+of individuals divergencies or contradictions are constantly arising.
+War violates the ordinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of
+truth; expediency, those of justice.  And the conclusion is drawn that
+whatever be the softening influences of civilization upon the relations
+of private life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, brutally
+aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns undisturbed.  Era succeeds
+era, faiths rise and set, statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs,
+act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
+their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
+the centuries.  And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
+"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
+Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
+self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
+each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
+whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
+individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
+actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
+the actions of individuals.  And he therefore is the greatest statesman
+who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
+to the individual&mdash;whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
+adventure!  The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
+the self-communings of Mazzini.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
+acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
+applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
+the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals.  The unity
+of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
+distinct from the unity of those parts.  Even in chemistry the laws
+which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
+constituent atoms.  And in that highest and most complex of all
+unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
+another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
+more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
+unities which compose it.  In the region in which States act and
+interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
+Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
+at least be <I>other</I> than the laws valid amongst individuals.  The orbit
+described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
+the orbit of the separate life.  The life which the individual
+surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
+return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
+conditions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
+between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
+but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
+suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
+by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
+of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
+something of a <I>petitio principii</I>, in the present stage of our
+knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
+other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
+been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
+distinction, between the two codes.  Every principle of Machiavelli is
+implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
+supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
+reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
+or an Oxenstiern.[<A NAME="chap02fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn1">1</A>]  The loss of Sulla's <I>Commentaries</I>[<A NAME="chap02fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn2">2</A>] is
+irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the <I>Annals</I> of Tacitus or
+the burnt <I>Memoirs</I> of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
+a disaster without a parallel.  What Sulla felt as a first, most living
+impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment.  It is
+thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
+<I>jeu d'esprit</I>, <I>Il Principe</I>, perplexing as <I>Hamlet</I>, and as variously
+interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the <I>Istorie</I> and
+the <I>Discorsi</I>, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
+profoundest of modern thinkers.  M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
+in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
+<I>Discorsi</I>; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
+the refutation of the <I>Prince</I>, began and ended his political career as
+if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
+inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
+of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
+history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
+enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
+spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
+History, are not identical with the laws of individual life.  The
+region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is
+possible to obtain some perception, or <I>Ahnung</I> as a German would say,
+of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly
+upon the problem before us.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history
+of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the
+present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence,
+not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic
+Tragedy.  The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the
+soul by Compassion and by Terror&mdash;+di eléou kaì phóbou kátharsis+.[<A NAME="chap02fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn3">3</A>]
+Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the
+definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present
+inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted
+above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of
+fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,<BR>
+Che la vostra miseria non mi tange<BR>
+Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[<A NAME="chap02fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn4">4</A>]<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision,
+discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues
+unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself.
+Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind,
+and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness
+of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their
+very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the
+loftiest that can engage the human intellect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a
+heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an
+Agamemnon or a Theseus.  Hence, though traceable in all, the operation
+of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the
+history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing
+dimensions.  Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more
+impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens&mdash;most poignantly
+perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of
+Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage,
+the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there
+came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced,
+started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread
+certainty of ruin.  That hour was but the essential agony of a
+soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
+of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
+Athens[<A NAME="chap02fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn5">5</A>] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.  In the
+writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
+pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
+Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the <I>Crown</I>, in the measured
+cadences of the <I>Panegyric</I>, the effort to lead Athens towards some
+higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
+power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
+Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal.  The serious admiration of
+Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
+appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
+not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
+Kleon or of Kritias.  History never again beheld such a band of
+pamphleteers![<A NAME="chap02fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn6">6</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
+similar moment occurs.  After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
+but rises a new city.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
+than the Rome of the Decemvirs.  It is not the inevitable change which
+centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
+Rome's life as a State.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
+Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
+eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
+to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
+imaginative justice of its sway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
+life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
+agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
+consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
+life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century.  After the
+short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
+humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity.  The empire
+purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
+chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
+turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
+The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign
+defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury,
+with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest
+of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the
+desperate lists at Bosworth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political
+historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret
+sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered
+by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned
+out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming
+power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a
+very complete manner.  It reveals itself, for instance, in two
+different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be
+dealt with separately.  In the first of these aspects, deeply and
+permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen
+is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy
+appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic
+transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene
+and dauntless courage.  This influence now makes itself felt in English
+politics, in English religion, in English civic life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at
+first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for
+empire.  Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not
+in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any
+sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks
+the imperial character of Persia and of Rome.  England seems fated to
+add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant
+States, illustrating the theme&mdash;+húbris phyteúei tyrannón+&mdash;"insolence
+begets the tyrant!"  Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns
+from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the
+earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from
+the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith.  And now in the
+days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to
+nothing.  Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow;
+but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais
+will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph.  It was not merely
+the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
+instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
+empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
+change is now apparent.  As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
+Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
+from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
+arises a new nation.  This declares itself in the altered course of her
+policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland.  In Ireland, for
+instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
+bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
+the Pale.  Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king.  In
+politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I.  He
+abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
+he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
+reverting to the Plantagenet policy.  He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
+but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
+not defeated at all.  King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
+around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
+"companions," <I>comites</I> indeed, in that title's original meaning.  But
+the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
+recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
+these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
+and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
+deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
+The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
+nationality, cement the union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
+causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
+sink from sight altogether.  As in geology the century is useless as a
+unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
+astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
+spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
+conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
+generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
+The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
+future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
+Chatham[<A NAME="chap02fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn7">7</A>] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
+that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
+a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
+Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
+the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
+could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
+rather than weakened the energy of her resolve.  Had England fallen in
+the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
+than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
+claim to original or creative Imperialism.  But if she were to perish
+now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
+the recorded annals of man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
+from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania.  And in Islam four
+generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
+displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
+its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
+generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
+unquestionable.  The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
+century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
+bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
+the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
+Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France.  The national
+consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
+its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
+influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
+affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
+England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
+memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
+and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
+strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
+sounds.  Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
+East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
+How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
+race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its
+own life by the contact with this manifold environment?  He who might
+have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
+presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
+influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
+sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
+ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
+the choral ode of the <I>Oedipus</I>, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
+range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
+history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
+moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
+exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
+serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
+law of its being.  There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
+the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
+the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
+Thermopylae, the +enérgeia tês psychês+&mdash;the energy of the soul.  This
+energy of the soul in Aristotle is the <I>vertù</I> of Machiavelli, the
+spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
+It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
+nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
+insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition.  It is the heroism which
+adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
+daring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
+centuries that immediately succeed Cannae.  Nothing in history is more
+worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
+history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
+Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
+place with the greatest political historians for all time.  It was his
+work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
+the supreme guide in political history.  Polybius has every inducement
+to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
+His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
+Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
+Kosciusko of the old world.  Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
+representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
+study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
+their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
+intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
+there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
+Hellas merely, but of the whole earth.  The message of his history,
+composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
+is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
+wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
+domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
+eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message.  The
+Romano-Hellenic empire is born.  Other men arise both to the east and
+to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
+fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
+Polybius was the first to express immortally.  It inspires the rhetoric
+of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,<BR>
+credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,<BR>
+orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus<BR>
+describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:<BR>
+tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;<BR>
+hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,<BR>
+parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
+"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
+incredible.  It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
+Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
+Claudian.  And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
+Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the <I>De Monarchia</I>, and yields
+such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
+Hapsburg and Bourbon.  Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
+uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
+itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
+flicker in the eighteenth century.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
+does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
+itself?  Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
+contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's
+title-deeds of empire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
+myth, the <I>gigantes</I>, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
+wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
+England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
+humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
+Scotland, greater than before her defeat.  This energy of the soul,
+quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
+struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
+England.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
+fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
+lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners.  But it has been transformed,
+and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
+enterprise.  These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
+the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
+kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
+false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
+of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
+way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
+nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
+this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
+memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
+Marlowe and his elder contemporaries.  Marlowe's[<A NAME="chap02fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn8">8</A>] great dialect seems
+to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's <I>Voyages</I>,
+that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
+some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
+emphasis of <I>Tamburlaine</I> are hardly perceptible.  In Martin Frobisher,
+for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
+us the England of the first years of Elizabeth!  Frobisher in early
+manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
+blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
+Genovese Columbus to discover America!"  That task was clearly
+England's!  "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
+sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
+northwest passage to Cathay.  Upon this he spends the pith of his
+manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
+sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
+"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
+forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
+suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
+Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable.  In the northern
+latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the <I>Michael</I>
+gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
+Christ His Sonne."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy
+of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
+times.  And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
+energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
+the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
+laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
+Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
+only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
+ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
+justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
+times.  If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
+implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
+systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs.  Eliot, for instance, in the
+work entitled <I>The Monarchy of Man</I>, lofty in its form as in its
+thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
+ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal.  We
+encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
+Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
+language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
+In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
+the steadfastness of the action.  And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
+from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
+Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
+imperfectly developed.  The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
+upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
+equally sublime, and more catholic and humane.  Whatever its immediate
+influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts
+it was all-powerful.  The very vividness with which they conceive the
+ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high
+purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of
+Selden, and of Falkland.  The perfect State, the scope of its laws,
+government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads
+thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at
+other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of
+adverse interests.  From the remote nature of their quest arises much
+of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era.  The
+parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from
+the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on
+is the star of England's destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of
+being mere theoricians in advance of their time,&mdash;an accusation fatal
+to statesmanship.  But the advent of that age was marked by so much
+that was novel in religion,[<A NAME="chap02fn9text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn9">9</A>] in State, in foreign and domestic
+policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two
+nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring
+creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply
+religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those
+times.  But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift
+glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of
+the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious
+to the suspicion of theory.  The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony
+with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him
+to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending,
+often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could
+command.  And yet his career is a presage of the future.  Toleration in
+religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the <I>habeas
+corpus</I>, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much
+distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation.  And
+there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward
+Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were
+to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters.  But the year of <I>Mare
+Clausum</I> is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months
+of greatness in the life of his royal master.[<A NAME="chap02fn10text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn10">10</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
+revolutionists.  Revolution is the child of speculation.  The men of
+the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics.  Their mark is a
+wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
+wondrous than that of Aeëtes.  But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
+the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
+the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
+Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
+though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
+last parted fatally from his companions.  Practical does not always
+mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
+to discuss whether the writer of <I>Defensio pro Populo Anglicano</I>, the
+destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
+practical politicians.  In their lives, in the shaping of their
+careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
+of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
+gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
+pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
+that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
+forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
+<I>Samson Agonistes</I>&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,<BR>
+Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,<BR>
+Without all hope of day.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+But not in vain.  The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
+these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
+completed the journey which they began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
+empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of <I>Argenis</I>,
+written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
+moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
+all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write <I>Télémaque</I>.  It meets us
+in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
+bears about it the air of a martyr's cell.  We find it again explicitly
+in the <I>Oceana</I> of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
+Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
+last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
+moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
+mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt.  It burns
+in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
+great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
+the great debate[<A NAME="chap02fn11text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn11">11</A>] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
+Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
+Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
+Stuart Mill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
+century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
+1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
+the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
+an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
+centuries we have indicated.  The leaders in this revolution, men like
+Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
+began.  They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
+else unanswered&mdash;How shall a people, not itself free, a people
+disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
+other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
+of India&mdash;Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
+twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
+undecaying memories of their fabulous past&mdash;to the Moslem populations
+whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
+before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
+is this.  Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
+distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia&mdash;thus it has
+arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
+former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
+the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream.  Thus it has
+arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
+the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
+magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
+ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
+itself through the ages&mdash;the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
+chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
+and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
+returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
+hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm,
+the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later
+centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned,
+far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning
+voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!
+This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.
+For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural
+design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately
+or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer
+purposes and to nobler ends.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap02fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn1text">1</A>] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic
+reflection is simply Machiavelism.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn2text">2</A>] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, <I>rerum suarum gestarum
+commentarii</I>, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in
+existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments
+which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss.  Of
+Sulla's verses&mdash;like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of
+Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams&mdash;exactly so
+much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England,
+or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily.  Sulla's remark on the
+young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as
+Richelieu's on Condé or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="chap02fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn3text">3</A>] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the
+continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator
+in the tragedy.  The transforming power is thus more intimate and
+profound.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn4text">4</A>] "God in His mercy such created me<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">"That misery of yours attains me not,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">"Nor any flame assails me of this burning."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn5text">5</A>] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between
+the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the
+singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice
+by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned&mdash;the author of
+the <I>Politics</I>&mdash;in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases
+as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand."  "Man when
+perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated
+from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all."
+"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the
+destruction of a City."  The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later
+date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct
+from that which characterizes his earlier works.  The shading-in of the
+life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it
+were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to
+the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears
+as difficult to imagine <I>before</I> Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon
+Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato,
+Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult <I>after</I> Syracuse to
+imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn6text">6</A>] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had
+before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted
+the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh.  Even their most
+speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered
+attainable by Hellas, or by Athens.  The disappearance of Socrates from
+the <I>Laws</I>, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of
+Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a
+concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since
+Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to
+the common life of Athens and of Hellas.  So in the England of the
+seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of
+Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical
+in their aims.  Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of
+Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord
+and its ills.  This was in 1628&mdash;fatal date!
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn7"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn7text">7</A>] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the
+English <I>people</I> as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell,
+Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king.  "It
+rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757.  Pitt
+was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the
+merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king,
+which led to his return to office in June.  The events of the period of
+four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the
+House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere
+enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents,
+characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:&mdash;December 17th, 1756,
+Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national
+militia organized.  1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and
+conquest of Bengal.  1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg,
+three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November
+25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree.  1759,
+"year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st,
+capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the
+flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August
+19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd,
+POCOCK defeats D'Aché; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt;
+September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada;
+November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me
+alongside the French Admiral."  1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats
+Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic.  1761, January 16th, English
+enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June
+7th; October 5th, PITT resigns.  It is doubtful whether, since the
+eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European
+stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and
+the king of Prussia.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn8"></A>
+<A NAME="chap02fn9"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn8text">8</A>] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in
+the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the
+wider in his intellectual range.  Worlds were open to his glance beyond
+the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens.  Yet Camoens is a
+heroic figure.  He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but
+to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires,
+hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen,
+thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that
+betrayed the hero.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn9text">9</A>] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship;
+yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes,
+hopes of this time.  In one sentence nineteen religions are named as
+co-existing in Scotland.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn10text">10</A>] The <I>Mare Clausum</I> was framed as an answer to Grotius' <I>Mare
+Liberum</I>, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in
+1610.  Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304
+pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for
+England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy
+over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern
+waters, and Venice over the Adriatic.  The King's enthusiasm was
+kindled.  The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State
+paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy,
+the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible
+rights of England.  Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the
+Exchequer and at the Admiralty.  A fleet was equipped, and as an
+atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King
+gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the
+noblest of Vandyck's canvases.  But Northumberland, though brave to a
+fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in
+ridicule.  Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation.  But
+in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left
+him.  To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's
+refusal.  The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to
+Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded
+events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's
+greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded
+by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold
+resolution.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,<BR>
+Living or dying.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart
+still beat.  An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the
+time of Cromwell.  The translator was Marchamont Nedham.  The
+dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of
+the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn11"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn11text">11</A>] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October
+1st, 1801.  Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's
+speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of
+the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the
+wedding-feast of Claudius.  In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt
+declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of
+Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should
+have the benefit of the colony without its expenses.  Nelson, with the
+glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that
+in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but
+now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere
+tavern that served to delay the voyage.  The opening of Windham's
+speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all,
+France nothing," defines his position (<I>Parl. Hist.</I> xxxvi, pp. 1-191).
+Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had
+passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to
+France.  Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments,
+but once understood by England there was no faltering.  Prussia,
+Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or
+alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
+England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Hélène.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE III
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, May</I> 22<I>nd</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the
+development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself
+that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions
+of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or
+dominion.  For such a study the materials are only in appearance less
+satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race.  It
+is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the
+Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that
+drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of
+performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of
+them impossible.  The reflection might be extended to other political
+revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde.  Ranke's
+indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as
+in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object
+than the impression of an impression.  No State papers, no documents,
+the most authentic, can take us further.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet
+for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age
+discovers itself.  Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of
+thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.
+It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's
+resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the
+prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the
+records of politics.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 1.  RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the
+development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the
+same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of
+the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which
+manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent.  The persecuting
+intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
+passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism
+or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of
+the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the
+creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists
+themselves&mdash;who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent
+or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all
+times.  The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier
+ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before
+Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its
+own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions,
+once hostile to its own.  By slow degrees England has arisen, first to
+the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of
+the truth in other faiths.  In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying
+races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the
+effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in
+Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in
+all ages, been the stamp of imperial races.  Upon the character of the
+race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the
+question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be
+exalted or debased.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century&mdash;the
+tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish&mdash;that we must
+turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life
+of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain
+of to-day.  The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had
+no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of
+England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of
+Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs.  The Reformation in
+England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart
+from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in
+England&mdash;the Puritan wars&mdash;to that earlier convulsion in the nation's
+consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have
+spoken at some length already.  But for the remoter origins and causes
+of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search
+not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race
+itself.  The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any
+more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs
+from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness
+with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions
+of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the
+"Whither?" of human life.  And it is the seriousness with which England
+regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it
+the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its
+sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
+swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the
+capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties.  Rome never
+endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher
+vision.  When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying.  Alaric and
+the fifth century have come.  For Rome the drama of a thousand years is
+ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly,
+tragically.  Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly?  Over
+a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on
+the still brow the secret of his own destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in
+Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion
+of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of
+flame, loveliest of inanimate things&mdash;even there no sustained, no
+deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the
+Persian sway can be discovered.  Islam starts with religious
+aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her
+ideals dies with Ali.  At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system
+warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a
+theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their
+political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often
+ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consider in contrast with these empires the question&mdash;What is the
+distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of
+its history?  Steadily growing from its first beginnings&mdash;shall I say,
+from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
+conflict and the slayer of two lies dead&mdash;steadily growing, on to the
+present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
+conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
+an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
+Divine.  From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
+arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
+justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
+freedom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
+between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
+far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
+found anywhere else in Europe.  Glance, for instance, at this struggle
+in Germany.  Witikind[<A NAME="chap03fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn1">1</A>] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
+gods against Christianity.  Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
+down amongst the Saxons.  His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
+of Constantine against Rome.  Witikind does rise to the heights of
+heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
+in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror.  Mercia, the
+kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
+gods against the religion of Christ&mdash;Penda.  There is no surrender
+here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
+himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
+An <I>intransigeant</I>, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
+last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism!  He
+lies dead there&mdash;he becomes no hanger-on.  There you have the spirit of
+the race.  It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
+well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
+mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
+death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
+seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
+with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
+sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
+little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
+darkness.  Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
+goeth we know not."  "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first
+translator, ends the passage.  Who does not see&mdash;notwithstanding the
+difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance&mdash;who
+does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the
+solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but
+which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone&mdash;+adêlon pantì
+plén é tô theô+"?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England
+between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted.  There in the
+seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and
+the insight which appear in other forms in after ages.  The roll of
+English names in the <I>Acta Sanctorum</I> is the living witness of the
+sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the
+death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal
+mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee
+transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship.  The Saintly
+Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was
+given but to pray for death.  Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that
+all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and
+splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from
+a city buried deep beneath the ocean.  Instead of defiance, Rome taught
+them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the
+worship of delight, the worship of sorrow.  In this faith the Saxon and
+the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live.  But the old faith
+died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle
+Age.  Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the
+war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of
+Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics.  Yet what a contrast is
+the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard
+Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to
+the new ideal&mdash;to them in the ninth century come the Vikings.  They are
+not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the
+wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and
+of the Northern Myths.  England as we know it is not yet formed.
+Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English
+freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned
+the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
+Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric.  To the
+religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
+bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious.  The struggle
+against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
+foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
+same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
+fourteenth century.  In the light of the future, the struggle of the
+ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
+the Heptarchic kings.  To this land of England the Vikings have the
+right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had&mdash;the right of
+supremacy, the right which the <I>will</I> to possess it and the resolution
+to die for that will, confers.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
+Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
+like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy.  Religion is
+the philosophy of the warrior.  And the scanty records of the Vikings,
+the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
+the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
+deeply than the thoughts of the dastard.  The Normans, who close the
+English <I>Welt-wanderung</I>, who close the merely formative period of
+England, illustrate this conspicuously.  If the sombre fury of the
+Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
+vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
+earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
+religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested.  Europe
+of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
+each a Teuton in blood&mdash;Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
+Conqueror.  In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
+has few parallels in history.  He is the founder of the Mediaeval
+Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
+State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
+Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
+execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
+astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
+fail.  One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman
+genius made upon him.  It was to transform this race, the tyrants of
+the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean
+and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the
+theocratic State whose centre was Rome.  But the vastness of his
+original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose
+with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by
+Buonarroti or Tintoretto.  Yet no ruler of men had a profounder
+knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had
+rendered him peculiarly familiar.  The judgment of Orderic and of
+William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand.  But the
+Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised
+from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly
+muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our
+race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire,
+Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English
+historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the
+descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory
+of France.  The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the
+attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious
+study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of
+Pitt!  How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the
+Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation
+at Westminster?  Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the
+Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.
+To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which
+the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit
+they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.
+But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less
+assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen:
+to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest,
+representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars.  Nature and her
+affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither
+for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had
+preceded them.  They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute
+and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the
+most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more
+richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon,
+Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan.  And who shall affirm from what
+branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals
+sprang?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last
+struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those
+various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred
+years make England, and who in their religious and political character
+lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their
+contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury&mdash;the Norman love of
+battle and the Norman love of God.  Upon these two ideas the history of
+the Middle Age turns.  The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the
+priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar
+and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence.  Chivalry is born.
+The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in
+Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men.  From the grave of
+his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the
+beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante
+rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even
+that age has carved in stone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of
+Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters
+greatly.  In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty rôle
+which the future centuries reserve for her is portended.  The immortal
+energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in
+the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's
+desire.  We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the
+Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great
+tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more
+continuous, was not more earnest.  How singular is the chance, if it be
+chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda,
+and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart!  Upon the
+shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring
+sway.  The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory
+of Richard is there imperishably.  Richard's services to England are
+not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a
+king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
+parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
+poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
+name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
+announcing the England of the years to come.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 4.  WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
+age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
+constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
+The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
+for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen.  In the steady
+development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
+the unwritten history of the English Reformation.  The race resolves no
+more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
+truth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
+In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
+Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
+last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
+appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII.  The
+statute of <I>praemunire</I>, a generation later, prepares the way for
+Wyclif.  The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs.  How
+shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Creçy and on other
+fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
+of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
+determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries.  In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
+presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
+their transforming power to spiritual life.  As in political life the
+sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
+sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
+consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
+vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
+others.  For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
+to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
+only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom
+and by faith.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome&mdash;a
+Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy&mdash;swept the
+Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
+herself had sought them.  This is the impulse which binds the whole
+English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
+from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle.  It is
+this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
+because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
+absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
+conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
+set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
+Reformation.  It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
+Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
+English historian has drawn his own Cromwell.  But to foreign
+historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal.  Dr.
+Döllinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
+study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
+vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past&mdash;he who by
+his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
+the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[<A NAME="chap03fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn2">2</A>]  This is the deliberate
+judgment of Döllinger.  It was the judgment of the peasants of the
+Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago!  Somewhat the same impression
+was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again in the seventeenth century, in the <I>Irene</I> of Drummond, and in
+the remarkable work of Barclay, the <I>Argenis</I>,[<A NAME="chap03fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn3">3</A>] in its whole
+conception of the religious
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P72"></A>72}</SPAN>
+life, of monasticism, as in its
+idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
+same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
+We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke.  It is the essential
+thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes.  It is supremely and beautifully
+expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
+of tolerance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney?  One who knew him well,
+though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
+kind of divine philosophy of the mind."  Community of religious not
+less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
+Shaftesbury.  In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
+they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau.  In the
+<I>Letters on Toleration</I>[<A NAME="chap03fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn4">4</A>] Locke did but expand the principles upon
+which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
+State.  The Record Office has no more precious document than the
+draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
+handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
+statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
+of his own or any age.  One suggested formula after another is
+traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
+citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
+or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God."  Algernon
+Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
+their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
+of Locke and Shaftesbury.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
+analogous to their position in politics, already delineated.  In
+politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
+and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future.  In religion
+they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
+centuries develop and apply.  Both in politics and in religion they
+turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
+consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
+Imperialism of to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
+roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
+civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
+intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
+found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
+eighteenth&mdash;intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
+religious.  England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
+the days of Descartes and Spinoza&mdash;the refuge of the oppressed, the
+home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
+asylum of Voltaire.[<A NAME="chap03fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn5">5</A>]  Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
+the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
+as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined.  The one is
+the organic inevitable growth of the other.  The England which fought
+at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
+Marston Moor and Dunbar.  Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
+than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
+parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
+Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
+earnestly reverent, when rightly studied.  Even its scepticism, its
+fiery denials, or vehement inquiry&mdash;a Woolston's, for instance, or a
+Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[<A NAME="chap03fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn6">6</A>] long
+afterwards&mdash;spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
+ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
+utter death.  And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
+outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
+constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
+comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
+great period of the <I>Aufklärung</I> in Germany.  Kant acknowledged his
+indebtedness to Hume.  Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
+in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
+<I>Decline and Fall</I>, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
+victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
+of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
+ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
+Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
+to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
+palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
+scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills.  An epic in prose&mdash;and every
+one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
+sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
+of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
+superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+David Hume's philosophy was more read[<A NAME="chap03fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn7">7</A>] in France than in Scotland or
+England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his <I>History of
+England</I>.  It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
+There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
+forgotten, the <I>Dialectique</I> of Ramus, for instance.  This is not to be
+regretted.  Hume's <I>History of England</I> is one of these books.  For
+nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English
+men and women read.  It was impossible that a man like Hume, the
+central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke,
+Shaftesbury, Gibbon&mdash;the desire for a larger freedom for man's
+thought&mdash;it was impossible for him to write without saturating every
+page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations
+could read that <I>History</I> without being insensibly, unconsciously
+transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by
+contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears
+fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
+the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards
+the peoples of India, towards Islam.  Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the
+foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching
+of Mohammedanism under the Queen.  It was not only Lord Kitchener who
+built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead
+in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the
+analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth
+century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent
+national or feudal England.  Erigena in the ninth century surveying all
+things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison
+"through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains
+it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by
+England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest
+aspirations, the very heart of the race.  The greatest empire in the
+annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most
+tolerant.  Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her
+glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons
+of time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this
+transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only
+from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the
+influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the
+Oriental peoples she conquers.  The work of the Arabists of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[<A NAME="chap03fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn8">8</A>]
+father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
+Locke and of Hume.  The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of
+Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to
+bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to
+converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present
+century&mdash;<I>The Sacred Books of the East</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion
+and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations
+towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice,
+summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with
+the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar
+of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in
+religious life or in political life or in any other form of life.  For
+all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly
+transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of
+Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually
+between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 5.  THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past,
+there is one more question to consider, though with brevity.  The great
+empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia,
+Islam, represent each a distinct ideal&mdash;in each a separate aspect of
+the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems
+incarnate.  In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +tò kalón+; in Rome,
+it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples,
+half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her
+kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that
+mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her
+architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy.  Other
+races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery;
+but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the
+sections of the race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this
+Empire of Britain represent?  Apart altogether from its individual
+ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race,
+distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the
+Persian, does it eminently possess?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the
+beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the
+beginnings of Rome.  Who founded the Roman State?  There is one fact
+about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient,
+that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from
+every city, district, region, in Italy.  The outlaw, the refugee from
+justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless
+man&mdash;these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the
+Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced
+marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in.  This process
+may have extended over a century&mdash;over two centuries; Rome drawing to
+itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in
+fortune as the first.  Who are the founders of England, of Imperial
+Britain?  They are those "co-seekers," <I>conqu&oelig;stores</I>, I have spoken
+of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to
+say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless&mdash;the fittest men
+of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but
+for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth
+and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws
+to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with,
+Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and
+followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I.  They
+come in "hundreds," they come in thousands.  Into England, as into some
+vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred
+years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and
+undivided, the English Nation.  Such was the foundation, such the
+building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its
+first beginnings this land can show.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic
+kindred, the testimony is not less sure.  What a heaven of light falls
+upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not
+begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey&mdash;works that sum up
+an old civilization!  Already is born that beauty which, whether in
+religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever.  And it
+is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and
+of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills.  The
+infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated
+on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its
+first appearance in history.  But of England and the Teutonic race what
+shall one say?  A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
+extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
+the political, and social conditions of life.  Freedom and deathless
+courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
+accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
+touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
+Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages.  In
+the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
+upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
+Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race.  In the Faust
+legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
+attains a supreme embodiment.  In the Oriental imagination the sense of
+the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
+and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
+apathy or despair.  But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
+from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
+rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
+and Teutonic literature, and even in action.  The spirit which
+originates the <I>Völker-wanderung</I>, for instance, reappears in the
+half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
+the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
+the crusades.  They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
+was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
+where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
+whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
+by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
+this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
+Teutonic race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
+attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
+dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
+epochs.  It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
+infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
+devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the
+common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls
+like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth
+and ninth centuries.  It adds the glamour as from a distant and
+enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the
+pilgrim's high endeavour.  It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners
+and made the ocean their inheritance.  In later times it reappears as
+the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate,
+yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its
+environment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first
+founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the
+founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the
+Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude,
+already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the
+coming harmonies, of <I>Faustus</I> and <I>Lear</I>, of <I>Hamlet</I> and <I>Adonais</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn1text">1</A>] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.
+Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something
+of the spirit of Arminius, <I>etwas vom Geiste Armins</I> (<I>D.K.I.</I>, p.
+112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of
+Waitz (<I>Verfassungsgeschichte</I>, iii, p. 120).  Yet the form Widu-kind
+is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the
+name.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn2text">2</A>] Döllinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable&mdash;"Aber er
+(<I>i.e.</I>, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Mächtigen, ein religiöses
+Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht,
+welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen
+den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich
+trug:&mdash;das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles
+religiösen Zwanges."  Proceeding to expand this idea, Döllinger again
+describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the
+inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern
+world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der
+Beherrscher eines mächtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkündete, die
+dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der
+öffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer
+zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen müssen.  Die Evangelische Union,
+welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein früher unbekanntes und für
+unmöglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen
+glücklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und
+vorbereitenden Gründer betrachten."&mdash;<I>Akademische Vorträge</I>, 1891, vol.
+iii, pp. 55, 56.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn3text">3</A>] The <I>Argenis</I> was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on
+religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its
+pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even
+of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put
+in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice
+and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to
+Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria.  In the
+motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and
+requires no other.  The <I>Argenis</I>, unfortunately for English
+literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the
+vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn4text">4</A>] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface
+to the English version of the Latin <I>Epistola de Tolerantia</I>, which had
+already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).
+"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the
+principal occasion of our miseries and confusions.  But whatever has
+been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure.  We
+have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of
+in our distemper.  It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts
+of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst
+us, that can do the work.  The first will but palliate, the second
+increase our evil.  Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and
+impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of."  The second
+Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May
+27th, 1690&mdash;the year of the publication of his <I>Essay on the Human
+Understanding</I>; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most
+eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th,
+1693.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn5text">5</A>] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when
+mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"
+an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires
+of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of
+Bolingbroke and Newton.  A hundred phrases could be gathered from his
+correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds
+serious or extravagant utterance.  Even in the last decades of his
+life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to
+Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the
+Romans, and the English"; and to Helvétius, about the same period
+(1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the
+adventurous thought of England.  He even forces Frederick the Great
+into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm&mdash;"Yes, you
+are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we
+Germans, we have caution."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn6text">6</A>] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the
+<I>Seasons</I>, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V.,
+<I>i.e.</I>, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide
+scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals
+the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression
+of the world-sorrow.  Several of the more violent pamphlets on
+religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity.  He died
+in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn7"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn7text">7</A>] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto
+of his <I>History of England</I> must be measured by the standard of the
+hopes he had formed.  Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he
+had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle
+unacknowledged.  But the appearance of his <I>History</I>, two years later
+than his <I>Political Discourses</I>, was synchronous with the darkest hours
+in English annals since 1667.  An English fleet had to quit the Channel
+before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated
+at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost.  At this period the tide of
+ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.
+The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment
+deep-seated and strong.  London had not yet forgotten the panic which
+the march of the Pretender had roused.  To the Scottish nation the
+massacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge&mdash;savage, pre-meditated,
+and impolitic.  The ministry of Chatham changed all this.  He raised an
+army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of
+England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families,
+bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but
+frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred
+in the ranks of English merchants.  Hume's work was thus caught in the
+stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
+was reflected upon its historian.  The general verdict was ratified by
+the concord of the best judgments.  Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
+faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
+Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the <I>Annual
+Register</I>.  Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
+the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
+epithet.  The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
+for their own&mdash;it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study.  Nor
+did its power diminish.  It contained the best writing, the deepest
+thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
+over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn8"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn8text">8</A>] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
+ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers.  Spinoza, for
+instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
+and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PART II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE IV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, May</I> 29<I>th</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth
+across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now
+control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher
+conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,
+and towards the State.  To-day a subject of more pressing interest
+confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and
+sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,
+arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears
+which compose the instant of man's life.  We are in the thick of the
+deed&mdash;how are we to judge it?  How conjure the phantoms inimical to
+truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate
+the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this
+aspect I propose to direct your attention.  The separate incidents of
+the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,
+politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom
+or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the
+resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,
+alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous
+surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not
+this&mdash;all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries
+hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired
+to see or imagined they saw.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the
+purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's
+sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?&mdash;these it
+is possible even now to consider, <I>sine ira et studio</I>.  What is its
+historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the
+presage of this great war&mdash;if it be a great war&mdash;for the future?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ I.  THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative
+or absolute, of the opposing forces.  Fewer men fell at Salamis than at
+Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[<A NAME="chap04fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn1">1</A>] the total force engaged did not
+exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the
+world.  The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with
+the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of
+the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy.  War is the supreme act in the
+life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is
+pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.
+It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever
+glorious, or swiftly forgotten.  What, then, are the principles at
+issue in the present war?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first
+event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies
+in this force named Imperialism.  It is the first conspicuous
+expression of this ideal in the world of action&mdash;of heroic action,
+which now as always implies heroic suffering.  No other war in our
+history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so
+exclusively the result of this imperial ideal.  Whatever may have been
+the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the
+motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal
+by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has
+been prescribed and controlled.  But the present war is not merely a
+war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.
+Thiers' refrain, <I>digue de l'attention des hommes</I>; but, like the wars
+of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war
+between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the
+life-history of modern States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom
+was arrayed against the principle of authority.  The conflict rolled
+hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour
+and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur,
+sublime devotion, or moving pity.  So in the war of the French
+Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the
+principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the
+combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia,
+Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most
+precious memories of mankind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is
+between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted.  But
+in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the
+conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often
+equally lofty, equally impressive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic
+in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the
+sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.
+There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at
+strife&mdash;the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which,
+for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.
+These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile
+veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose <I>dénouement</I>&mdash;who dare
+foretell?  What distant generation shall behold <I>that</I> curtain?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as
+in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now
+name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting.  The empire which
+has ceased to advance has begun to recede.  Motion is the law of its
+being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death.  Thus in a
+race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is,
+Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of
+evolution it attains.  The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State
+passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or
+swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature.  No
+great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age.  The
+patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the
+actualized ideal of his time.  Eliot in the seventeenth century died
+for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would
+have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he
+would have added his great name to imperialism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial
+State, of a race destined to empire.  In such a State, Nationality has
+no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.
+The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in
+literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century
+belonged to the idea of liberty alone.  The part which it has played in
+Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,
+above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four
+centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power.  In
+the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were
+inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the
+rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy
+into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics
+of the Balance-of-Power[<A NAME="chap04fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn2">2</A>] theory, a disruption occurred between these
+ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents
+itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,
+and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of
+1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to
+Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.
+Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was
+a shadow from the past.  The men of that time do not differ more widely
+from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great
+figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[<A NAME="chap04fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn3">3</A>]
+The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German
+publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of
+history that the great <I>rôle</I> which it has played is transient and
+accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards
+which the life of a State moves.  It is one thing to exalt the grandeur
+of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that
+it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to
+trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's
+life more auspicious.  Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be
+ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State
+system of modern Europe.  For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,
+not merely to the present, but to the future world.  Rome effaced the
+distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the
+bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,
+made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain.  To the
+cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of
+municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew
+the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age.  For this,
+Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy&mdash;"the
+stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"&mdash;but the
+political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,
+shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not
+from papal, but from imperial Rome.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,
+of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle
+of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as
+humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.
+Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but
+recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other
+continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,
+and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the
+side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality
+and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against
+each other.  Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,
+of which the Nation is the constituent unit.  Ancient Hellas presents a
+similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but
+the City.  There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a
+conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a
+conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic
+imperialism.  And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert
+hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war.  The issue
+is known.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her
+empire, was a disaster to humanity.  The spring of Athenian energy was
+broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of
+government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a
+ruin.  Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the
+lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as
+this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of
+Athens or the Rome of the Antonines.  Britain conquers, but by the
+testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her
+confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity.  "The earth
+is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's
+secret, her empire is the highway of nations.  That province, that
+territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby
+redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between
+the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality&mdash;in the
+Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality&mdash;and the vital
+principle of the future.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less
+significant.  It is the first great war waged by the completely
+constituted democracy of 1884.  In the third Reform Bill, as we have
+seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their
+realization.  The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the
+fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,
+Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,
+attain in this Act their consummation and their end.  The wars waged by
+the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their
+constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig
+or Tory oligarchies of last century.  But in the present conflict a
+democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated
+by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared
+together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles
+and the Islam of Omar.[<A NAME="chap04fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn4">4</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted
+purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the
+ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.
+It was not Clive merely who gained India for England.  French
+incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought
+on our side.  Napoleon knew this.  What a study are those bulletins of
+his!  After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,
+assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"
+and so on till Waterloo.  His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power
+of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but
+not for ever.  The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the
+French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation.  The sarcasm,
+which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its
+edge&mdash;"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I
+opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds."  There is
+nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of
+unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,
+and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird.  The
+march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its
+primitive instincts.  The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the
+visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel
+of a cannon on board the <I>Muiron</I>.[<A NAME="chap04fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn5">5</A>]  Napoleon was fighting for a dead
+ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal&mdash;how
+should he prosper?  Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine
+frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon
+policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to
+Ste Hélène.  Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made
+the return of mediaeval despotism impossible.  Dying, he bequeaths
+imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of
+Faust and Helena.  How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism
+Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a
+capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism.  The "Serrar
+del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic
+States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to
+offer a closer parallel to this of Britain.  But a ruthless fanaticism,
+religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the
+Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs.  Spain fought with grandeur,
+heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the
+suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour
+frustrate and her devotion vain.  She warred against the light, and the
+enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races
+and generations unborn.  What criterion of truth, what principle even
+of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to
+assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting
+as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our
+fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of
+Spain?  England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods
+the methods of Spain.  The war in Africa&mdash;is it then a war waged for
+the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the
+triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria?  But, it is
+urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same
+stubborn, unyielding stock as our own."  In the sense that they are
+Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the
+characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,
+and the Norseman.  The best blood of the Teutonic race for six
+centuries went to the making of England.  At the period when the
+Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the
+English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the
+empire of the future.  As for the former clause of the assertion, it is
+accurate of no race, no nation.  The history of the United Provinces
+does not close with John de Witt and William III.  Can those critics of
+the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,
+and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland
+in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,
+the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and
+in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to
+Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested
+by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of
+Amsterdam to Brunswick?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and
+literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race
+to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.
+In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious
+oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius
+in Macedon or in modern France.  When that force is withdrawn, there is
+an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an
+Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies
+also.  In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have
+never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic
+self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh
+ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations
+of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and
+Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to
+the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an
+impressive and even tragic significance.  For though the stage on which
+Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is
+not less elevated and serene.  A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as
+living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the
+warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then
+through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing
+within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the
+bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.
+But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a
+dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad
+succeed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and
+exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam
+of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to
+every student of speculative politics at the present hour is&mdash;Whither
+will this portent direct its energies?  Will it press onward towards
+some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,
+sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically
+inexhaustible forces to waste unused?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every
+region of that empire and from every section of that society of
+nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race
+towards the present war, are not without deep significance.  Now at
+last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with
+the English race.  The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social
+environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions,
+are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not.
+Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the
+place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within
+his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon&mdash;"Our
+life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time."
+Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast
+bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one
+hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy,
+is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and
+of the course which this people will pursue?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word
+English People has undergone.  When Froissart, for instance, in the
+fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him
+the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black
+Prince or de Bohun.  The work of the archers at Creçy and Poitiers
+extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the
+spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included
+under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as
+late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks
+which it covered in the sixteenth century.  Thus when Chatham or Burke
+speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like
+Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view.  And
+Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame
+Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo.  The
+Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its
+responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the
+whole race, is intelligible enough.  But in this point the admirers of
+the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers
+of Pitt than the followers of Chatham.  The hazard of enfranchising the
+millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British
+blood, was a great, a breathless hazard.  Might not a mob arise like
+that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage
+added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making
+the guillotine a welcome release?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it
+is a winning hazard.  To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the
+Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,
+from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy!  <I>Populus Anglicanus</I>&mdash;it has risen in
+its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on
+fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of
+Sidney and Wolfe.  Has not the present war given a harvest of
+instances?  The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death
+threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell
+message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of
+Abraham&mdash;"Have we won?"  Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,
+dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me
+aside, men, and go on!"  Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and
+summoned at great odds to surrender.  "Never!" was the brief imperative
+response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot
+through the heart, he falls dead.  This is the spirit of the ranks,
+this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the
+enfranchised masses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated.  Neither the Peninsular
+nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,
+exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the
+self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war
+by those youths, the <I>gens Fabia</I> of modern days, prodigal of their
+blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had
+sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it
+with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 4.  COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within
+the tented field or confined to the battle-line.  The eyes of the race
+are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts
+of the actors.  There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved
+purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,
+disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom,
+that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the
+past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not
+less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic.  Such
+manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its
+extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some
+earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising
+like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with
+Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism.  Now
+what is Cosmopolitanism?  It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it
+is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races.
+It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy.  It is
+the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its
+stead.  Imperialism is active, is constructive.[<A NAME="chap04fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn6">6</A>]  It is the passion
+of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a
+Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of
+humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning.  But
+between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm,
+a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born
+of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is
+realized, the gulf is wide.  Napoleon knew this.  Nothing in history is
+more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from
+the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated
+sovereign, Francis II.  All his victories could not purchase him <I>that</I>!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand
+sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the
+government, the army, the empire?  Or would they have it like the Roman
+mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire,
+battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and
+a circus ticket?  Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob
+and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space;
+but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is
+but an ignorant or a transient frenzy.  In religion itself have we not
+similar variety of expression?  Those faces gathered under the trees or
+in a public thoroughfare&mdash;the expression of emotion there is not that
+which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light
+falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St.
+Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers&mdash;but dare
+we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 5.  MILITARISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite
+from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there
+is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments
+start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil
+which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and
+more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most
+reluctant.  Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the
+spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for
+all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of
+a misunderstanding or envious antagonism.  Whither is this impulse to
+be directed?  What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility
+of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this
+people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes?  How shall its
+bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from
+coalesced foes?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole
+standpoint from which I have the right&mdash;to use a current phrase&mdash;to
+speak as an expert.  First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim
+which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen,
+the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate
+any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history.  It
+has no foundation in history at all.  Nothing in the past justifies the
+ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people.  Of an
+ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not
+disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless&mdash;who shall assign bounds to its
+devotion or determine the limits of its endurance?  I go further, I
+affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which
+England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later
+times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at
+this crisis&mdash;this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think
+no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since
+the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens&mdash;the ministry or cabinet
+which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find
+that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but
+the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of
+its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has
+marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth.  This, I maintain,
+is the verdict of history upon the matter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an
+argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations.  Men
+point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over
+civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from
+conscription!"  Such arguments have precisely the same value as the
+arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the
+terror of Jacobinism.  We might as well condemn all free institutions
+because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its
+abuses in other countries.  And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or
+to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an
+appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell.  Nor is
+there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,
+between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of
+Sophocles, a military State, attests.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into
+being.  And this ideal of Imperial Britain&mdash;to bring to the peoples of
+the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher
+justice&mdash;the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that
+for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.
+Louis died.  There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage
+from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the
+just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of
+our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have
+brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise
+which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial
+Parliament is to the parliaments of the world&mdash;a paragon and an example.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With us the decision rests.  If we should decide wrongly&mdash;it is not the
+loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is
+the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the
+inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes
+of the unborn.  Who can confront this unappalled?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn1text">1</A>] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira,
+A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina.  The
+victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed
+himself in his divine mission.  Mohammed refers to this triumph in
+surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of
+Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn2"></A>
+
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn2text">2</A>] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, <I>Fragmente aus der neuesten
+Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa</I>, Dresden, 1806,
+is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the
+classic on this subject.  It gained him the friendship of Metternich,
+and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent
+exponent of Austrian principles.  But he was sincere.  To the charge of
+being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with
+Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought.  The friendship of Rahel and
+Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion.  Nor is his undying
+hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he
+translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he
+not unsuccessfully imitated.  Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at
+Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just
+long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X.
+But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the
+strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear.  So that
+as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task.  Napoleon
+slept at St. Helena, his child, <I>le fils de l'homme</I>, was in a
+seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and
+Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; <I>quotusquisque
+reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset</I>? who was there any longer to
+remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schönbrunn?  And yet
+exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last,
+the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833,
+announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that
+of 1789.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn3"></A>
+
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn3text">3</A>] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious
+but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when
+designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution
+of 1789.  It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688
+possible.  The true comparison&mdash;if any comparison be possible between
+revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though
+following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and
+character&mdash;would be between the Puritan struggle and the first
+revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of
+James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X.  Both Guizot, whose
+memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master
+Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison&mdash;the
+latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the
+imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the
+nation.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn4"></A>
+
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn4text">4</A>] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present
+work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years
+between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.
+632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,
+A.D. 661.  Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality
+of Omar made themselves distinctly felt.  During the caliphate of Abu
+Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the
+two pontificates which immediately precede his own.  Omar's is the
+determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates
+of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its
+distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of
+Islam.  The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind
+mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of
+Sulla or the Athens of Pericles.  From the Arab historians a portrait
+that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise
+with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he
+undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his
+appearance and manners which tradition has preserved&mdash;"He that is
+weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have
+made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal
+with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn5"></A>
+
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn5text">5</A>] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and
+Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same
+visionary but mighty designs.  In Napoleon's career the voyage on the
+frigate <I>Muiron</I> marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from
+Gaul, January, 49 B.C.  But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the
+head of fifty thousand men.  Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone.  The
+best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, the "Roland"
+of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessières, Marmont, Lavalette, but
+to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of
+Kleber and the army of the Pyramids.  The adventure appears more
+desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited
+Napoleon at Paris.  Moreau was no Pompey.  The sequence of dates is
+interesting.  On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on
+board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he
+reached Ajaccio; on October 9th he lands at Fréjus, on the 16th he is
+at Paris, and resumes his residence in rue de la Victoire.  Three weeks
+later, on November 9th, occurs the incident known to history as 18th
+Brumaire.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap04fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn6text">6</A>] The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even the
+antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism.  Rome, Hellas,
+Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern to a <I>more
+excellent</I> degree than other States&mdash;Imperialism is the realization of
+this power.  Cosmopolitanism's <I>laissez-faire</I> is anarchism or it is
+the betrayal of humanity.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE V
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+WHAT IS WAR?
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, June</I> 12<I>th</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the
+political development of the national as of the civic State, and that
+to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the
+future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be
+described as democratic displays itself&mdash;a mode which in human history
+is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with
+consequences memorable to all time&mdash;the problem meets us, will this
+form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war
+not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a
+State?  Even a partial solution of this problem requires a
+consideration of the question "What is War?"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 1.  THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as
+the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or
+from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the
+tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of
+Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the
+limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as
+just or unjust.  But another aspect of the question concerns us
+here&mdash;What is War in itself and by itself?  And what is its place in
+the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity,
+distinct from the unities which compose it?  Is war a fixed or a
+transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent,
+does its relation to the world-force admit of description and
+definition?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive
+at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part
+which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical
+enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives,
+impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history,
+the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which
+humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another
+shape&mdash;whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a
+State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to
+the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the
+Highest Good?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the
+conflict of two ideals.  The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a
+cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a
+profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of
+Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the
+ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which
+Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest
+trilogies.[<A NAME="chap05fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn1">1</A>]  The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent
+gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and
+ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage
+to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least
+details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that
+of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and
+Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records
+were to perish.  <I>Qui habet tenam habet bellum</I> is but a half-truth.
+No war was ever waged for material ends only.  Territory is a trophy of
+battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political
+genius, the imagination of the race.  One of the profoundest of modern
+investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the
+attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by
+which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[<A NAME="chap05fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn2">2</A>]
+The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops
+the latent qualities of a race.  The restless and melancholy surge, the
+wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of
+the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab.  Not the cry of
+"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by
+the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,
+spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the
+marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary
+homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of
+Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming.  To
+the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the
+transforming power of a new ideal.  The cry "<I>Deus vult!</I>" at Clermont
+marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of
+Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and
+Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the
+war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the
+troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the
+crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or
+of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as
+an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and
+results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that
+indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus
+affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour&mdash;"Subit quippe etiam
+ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,
+reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the
+consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic
+kindred, amongst the nations of the earth.  If ever there were a race
+which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the
+Hebrew.  They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than
+Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their
+retreat by day and by night ceaselessly.  Every battle is a Lake
+Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that
+nerves the right arm of his faithful.  The forms of Gideon and Joshua,
+though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of
+their race&mdash;Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[<A NAME="chap05fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn3">3</A>] and Mothanna.
+The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant
+for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of
+unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas
+Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the
+"Marseillaise," appear of no account&mdash;the <I>Al Naharoth Babel</I>&mdash;"Let my
+sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"&mdash;passing from the
+mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a
+rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when
+baulked of their God-appointed fate.  Yet on the shores of the Western
+Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they
+found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and
+Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.
+Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but
+even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of
+thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the
+character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which
+marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the
+certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he
+has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua
+of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in
+no lust for territory that these wars originate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war
+occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies
+in the Hebrew.  It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the
+pursuit of a fate-appointed end.  Aristotle, with his inveterate habit
+of subjecting all things&mdash;art, statesmanship, poetry&mdash;to ethics,
+regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against
+the enervating influence of peace.  As the life of the individual is
+divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the
+life of the State is divided between war and peace.  But to greatness
+in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition.  The State which
+cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.
+"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State
+which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave."  Aristotle
+does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the
+sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is
+incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to
+freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that
+belongs to peace can never come.  Courage, Plato defines as "the
+knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not
+fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the
+unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that
+end is manifest.  This ideal element, this formative principle,
+underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from
+its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean
+League&mdash;from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as
+the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos
+by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last
+bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus.  It requires a
+steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of
+Greeks against Greeks&mdash;Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and
+Macedon&mdash;and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this
+consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to
+resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous
+fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of
+Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's
+nature it is superfluous to speak.  As in statesmanship, so in war, he
+who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and
+thinks that all is said.  The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as
+an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the
+race that bore it to victory and world-dominion.  History by fate or
+chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius.  The
+silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of
+the <I>Labarum</I> by Constantine heralded its decline.  With the emblem of
+humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the
+centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its
+ancient valour&mdash;as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and
+Zimisces[<A NAME="chap05fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn4">4</A>]&mdash;bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman
+legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the
+ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the
+Bosphorus.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  DEFINITION OF WAR
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without
+deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element
+in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the
+present.  Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment
+of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny
+and in after ages, a profound enough significance.  Behind the
+immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the
+destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing
+relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly
+reveals itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the
+State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus,
+the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment.
+Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life,
+whether of the conquering or of the conquered State.  War is thus a
+manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and
+awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man.  It is an action
+radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies,
++agôníai+, conflicts, of all life.  "In this theatre of a world," as
+Calderon avers, "all are actors, <I>todos son representantes</I>."  There
+too the State enacts its tragedy.  Nation, city, or empire, it too is a
+<I>representante</I>.  Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the
+Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the
+stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal.  A
+war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State
+analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's
+phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of
+the Summoner.  The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is
+content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny,
+and swerve not from its being's law.  Not to be envied is that man who,
+in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an
+organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God!  God is the God of
+all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the
+forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk.  A mockery?  That
+cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which
+is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in
+the heart of each man on the tented field&mdash;"Through death to life, even
+through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through
+the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher
+freedom!"&mdash;is this a mockery?  Yet such is the prayer of armies.  War
+so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,
+regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or
+human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living
+and consoling power&mdash;"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide
+earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which
+they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come
+after them.  They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of
+achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown.  Fortunate!
+And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject
+unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so
+glorious a shape!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in
+poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human
+heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony
+to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence
+for existence' sake&mdash;his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,
+to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their
+condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.
+Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern
+mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth
+century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of
+Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in
+the great days of Louis XV.  In the gray and neutral region where the
+spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as
+soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke
+the hostility of one-half the world&mdash;when he speaks, he speaks not to
+Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined
+limits of Greater Britain.  Of no other living writer can this be said.
+Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so
+instantly a universal hearing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How then does Tolstoi regard War?  For on this high matter the judgment
+of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny.  Examining his
+writings, even from <I>The Cossacks</I>, through such a masterpiece as <I>War
+and Peace</I>, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his
+latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his
+thought reveals itself&mdash;gradually increasing vehemence in the
+expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of
+oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by
+God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence
+turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision.  This general
+impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and
+characters.  Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say
+the Borodino, to describe?  That which rivets his attention, absorbs
+his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even
+of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle
+itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such
+spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched
+countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their
+own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the
+hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated
+limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death.  Has he the
+enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I?  In Napoleon, who in the
+sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere
+of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbé de
+Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without
+greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace,
+shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming
+myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning
+of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with
+which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat.  And the
+campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial?  Lodi, Arcola,
+Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig,
+Champaubert, and Montmirail?  These all are the deeds of Chance, of
+happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark,
+unthinking force resident in masses of men.  This is Tolstoi's
+conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the
+Semitic&mdash;its crowning glory in war.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a
+visionary, not less great than Tolstoi&mdash;Carlyle.  Like Tolstoi, Carlyle
+is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew
+prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast
+between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's
+decrees, it is meant to be.  Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?
+His work is the witness.  After the brief period of Goethe-worship,
+from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not
+monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his
+work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,
+and the mystery of war.  One flame-picture after another sets this
+principle forth.  What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of
+Tolstoi!  Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of
+the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes.  These represent
+Carlyle in the flush of manhood.  His fiftieth year ushers in the
+battle-pictures of the Civil War&mdash;Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,
+when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation.  The greatest
+epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of <I>Frederick</I>, is
+also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings.  And
+finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the
+last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness
+of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,
+Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king.  In the last sea-fight of Olaf
+there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[<A NAME="chap05fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn5">5</A>] the
+same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when
+he wrote Valmy and Jemappes.  Since the heroic age there are no such
+battle-pictures as these.  The spirit of war that leaps and laughs
+within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of <I>Beowulf</I> and
+the <I>Song of Roland</I>, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a
+sun.  The breath that blows through the <I>Iliad</I> stirs the pages of
+<I>Cromwell</I> and of <I>Frederick</I>; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,
+Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of
+modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the
+combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not
+less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the
+Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes
+this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the
+circumstance of war?  To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as
+to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme
+expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic
+hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such.  To Carlyle
+war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence
+in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is
+that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above&mdash;a
+race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon
+the fortunes of the stricken field!  Carlyle, as his writings, as his
+recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the
+pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but
+are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled
+limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day
+after Borodino?  The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the
+battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker
+which discovers the united agony.  It was a profounder vision, a wider
+outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[<A NAME="chap05fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn6">6</A>] apparently blind to
+that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi&mdash;the
+pathological.  And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been
+loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as
+his fathers before him have done.  Tolstoi has no system to crown, like
+Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of
+universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content.  Whither then
+shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 4.  COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a
+characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays
+itself.  The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a
+native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every
+epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan
+of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider
+than Voltaire's&mdash;Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval
+Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of
+France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr.
+Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a <I>Catiline</I>, and in later life
+seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the <I>Emperor and
+Galilean</I>, in the Rome of the fourth century.  But in Russia Tolstoi
+begins, and in Russia he ends.  As volume after volume proceeds from
+his prolific pen&mdash;essays, treatises theological or social, tales,
+novels, diaries, or confessions&mdash;all alike are Russian in scenery,
+Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their
+aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs.  Nowhere is there a trace
+of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured
+Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour.  In this he but resembles the Russian
+writers from Krilov to the present day.  It is equally true of Gogol,
+of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.
+If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at
+Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene
+Pavlovna unfolds itself.  Thus confined in his range, and in his
+inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker,
+springs straight from the heart of the race itself.  When therefore
+Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the
+judgment of the race.  In his conception of war the force of the
+Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius.  Capacity
+in a race for war is distinct from valour.  Amongst the Aryan peoples,
+the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life
+unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war
+sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the
+other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for
+the realization of a great political ideal.  Thus the history of the
+two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads
+like the history of Ireland.  It is studded with combats, but there is
+no war.  The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the
+Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis.  And three
+centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the
+charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius.
+Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and
+has no intelligible end.  And the noblest figure in Czech history,
+George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[<A NAME="chap05fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn7">7</A>] has etched with
+laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a
+warrior.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic
+resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs.  His sombre
+courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace.  Eyiau and
+Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of
+his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,
+illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in
+defence."  And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an
+instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal.  War has
+served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the
+aspirations of his race.  Conceived as the effort within the life of
+the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.
+He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or
+for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive
+ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never
+used it.  Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the
+Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan
+IV, and his successors, attests this.  The Don Cossacks destroy the
+last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from
+the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of
+Ginghis.  The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of
+Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable
+conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.
+The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics
+which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting.  Indeed
+the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,
+derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable
+languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political
+indifferentism.  Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,
+is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked
+the Slav throughout history.  Catherine the Great felt this.  Its
+spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that
+now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the
+fanaticism of the Moslem."  The impressive designs of Nicholas I left
+the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which
+has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a
+pseudo-Machiavellianism.  It does not originate, like the policy which
+a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described
+or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all
+must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the
+<I>camerilla</I> which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind
+it.  Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the
+race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and
+false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of
+<I>Valérie</I>, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the
+noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[<A NAME="chap05fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn8">8</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history
+throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war.  The government
+perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who,
+unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance
+not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual
+or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic
+people.  Therefore he will not die in exile.  The bigotry of a priest
+may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government,
+instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III,
+will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan
+Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 5.  THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the
+writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to
+which I must allude briefly.  There are many men within these islands,
+if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England
+in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague
+consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi
+declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ.
+This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence,
+more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may
+have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have
+now to offer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the
+past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most
+religious amongst the divisions of those races&mdash;the Hebrews, the
+Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii&mdash;have been the most
+warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends.  This fact
+is significant, because war, like religion and like language,
+represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.
+In a work of art, the <I>Phaedrus</I> of Plato or the <I>Bacchus and Ariadne</I>
+of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,
+sovereign and despotic.  But as a language represents the happy moments
+of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit
+sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and
+to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of
+desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion
+the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of
+generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity
+in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the
+action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race.  Religion
+incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,
+the <I>will</I>, of a race.  Reflecting then on the part which war has
+played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those
+States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient
+features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as
+opposed to religion in general?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is
+remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the
+faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled <I>My Religion</I> has
+thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as
+distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have
+perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual
+utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one
+syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State
+and State.  The <I>locus classicus</I>, "All that take the sword," etc., is
+aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost
+range against civic revolt.  It is only by wrenching the words from
+their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to
+the relations of one State to another.  The organic unity, named a
+State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a
+mere aggregate of those units.  If there is a lesson which history
+enforces it is this lesson.  And upon the laws which regulate those
+unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word.  The violence of
+faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his
+utterances.  Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning
+rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the
+<I>Internationale</I>, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to
+Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in
+His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their
+fantasies.  But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the
+politics of State and State.  Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in
+His utterances, but not politics.  His solitary reference to war as
+such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it
+into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war.  And the peace upon
+which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity
+of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing.  It is the peace on
+which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises
+within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,
+of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the
+battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep
+and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert
+beneath the midnight stars.  Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his
+extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the
+same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who
+compose the State.  And of such a war as this in which Britain is now
+engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which
+in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger
+freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but
+the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being
+without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen
+the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State&mdash;who
+shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is
+contrary to the teachings of Galilee?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of
+religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other
+means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the
+establishment of the empire of perpetual peace.  The advent of this new
+era, it is announced, is at hand.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 6.  THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Now the origins of this ideal are clear.  It is ancient as life, and
+before man was, it was.  It is the transference to the sphere of States
+of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the
+soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal
+leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in
+death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the <I>theôria</I> of
+eternity.  The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and
+Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation
+of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in
+the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Will War then never cease?  Will universal peace be for ever but a
+dream?  Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the
+forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the
+crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages
+the imagination of a race, is instructive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in
+the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster.
+"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
+good tidings, that publisheth peace!"  In this and in other splendid
+pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal
+in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested!
+In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted!  But
+it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of
+yet.  It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and
+beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being,
+inviolate of Time.  Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the
+world, centres in Judaea&mdash;in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the
+overthrow of all its adversaries.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if
+peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the
+fountain from which it must flow.  It is an imperial peace bounded by
+Hellenic civilization, culture, laws.  It is a peace forged upon war.
+Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.
+Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.  For my
+brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within
+thee.'"  Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a
+Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rome by war ends war, and establishes the <I>Pax Romana</I> within her
+dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt.  Disregarding the
+dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the
+world outside those limits.  St. Just's proud resignation, "For the
+revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of
+those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire.  To pause
+is disaster; to recede, destruction.  Rome understood this, and her
+history is its great comment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not
+less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high.  Neither
+Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,
+stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than
+the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the
+Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment.  Then and
+then only shall the Holy War end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Peace of Islam, <I>Shalom</I>, which is its designation, is the serenity
+of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending.  And
+Virgil&mdash;in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all
+his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of
+an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims
+fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen
+music of the <I>Georgics</I>, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things
+human of the <I>Aeneid</I>&mdash;has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian
+age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but
+the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the
+proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's
+respite to a war-fatigued world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the
+Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval
+Latinists as the <I>Treva</I> or <I>Treuga Dei</I>.  This "Truce of God" was a
+decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain
+sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against
+another which darkens our early history.  It is the mediaeval
+equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of
+Universal Peace.  Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support
+than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,
+giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever
+received.  And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace
+is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[<A NAME="chap05fn9text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn9">9</A>] This is
+conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three
+centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the
+desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.
+This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona,
+where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that
+never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to
+bear the crusaders to Palestine&mdash;yet there were neither armies nor
+ships, it was but the fever of his dream.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded.  The
+wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds.  "I am
+not come to bring peace among you, but a sword."  Luther, for instance,
+declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the
+ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the
+Albigenses.  War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it
+became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish
+Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes.  As
+Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the
+Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the
+position of the legists of the Reformation.  In his work, <I>De Jure
+Belli ac Pacis</I>, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is
+altogether set aside.  War is accepted as existent between nation and
+nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate
+it.  Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of
+Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its
+conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions
+which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost
+observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated.  But the
+treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the
+method of his contemporary, Verulam&mdash;the method of the science of the
+future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable
+enthusiast, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,[<A NAME="chap05fn10text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn10">10</A>] made a profound impression
+upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.
+Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the
+same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.
+It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the
+Encyclopédie.  It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording
+the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless
+paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history
+arise.  Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's
+History, but its influence disappears as the work advances.  It charmed
+the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his
+impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory
+of France.[<A NAME="chap05fn11text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn11">11</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over
+the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.
+This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"
+This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of
+Universal Peace&mdash;a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking
+out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest
+yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our
+race.  The Hundred Days are its epilogue&mdash;the war of twenty-five years
+ending in that great manner!  Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once
+more arises.  Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till
+six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent
+conference at The Hague.  Its derisive results, closing the debate of
+the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth
+century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of
+comment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of
+Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all
+in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or
+Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still
+in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil
+strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments
+of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in
+Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the
+wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugène, and of
+Frederick.  The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,
+the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the
+leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods.  On the
+other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great
+thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely
+the phantom of their logic, an <I>eidôlon specus</I> created by their
+system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or
+desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all
+life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life
+is answered by implication.  For the history of the ideal of Universal
+Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a
+manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as
+such, inseparable from man's life here and now.  In all these great
+wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the
+Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are
+ultimately phases of one Idea.  It is by conflict alone that life
+realizes itself.  That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of
+Being as such.  From the least developed forms of structural or organic
+nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,
+the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute.  The very magic
+of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something
+of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,
+mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across
+the abysses and orbits of the worlds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and
+the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born
+from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded
+struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of
+transcendent rapture and light?  By this conflict, multiplex or simple,
+the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,
+the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,
+is attained.  They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment
+of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a
+loveliness for ever.  And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the
+idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this
+<I>agonia</I> increase.  It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest
+peace dwells.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region
+of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.
+Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual <I>agonia</I>,
+are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is
+one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by
+conflict?  In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed
+of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each
+penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent
+<I>nisus</I>, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that <I>there</I> this mystic
+all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as
+it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and
+have an end!  War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,
+there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler
+causes&mdash;but cease?  How shall it cease?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a
+dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has
+crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,
+start from their orbits.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 7.  IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be
+asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this
+of Imperial Britain?  The effects upon war, will, I should say, be
+somewhat of this nature.  It will greaten and exalt the character of
+war.  Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of
+the present lie deep in the past.  In the wars of an imperial State the
+ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to
+the life of the present.  From the earliest tribal forays, slowly
+broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to
+the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle
+links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of
+empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice.  And this
+ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity
+of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,
+manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the
+'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes
+of a Cerdic or an Uffa.  For the State which by conquest or submission
+is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law
+of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in
+the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now
+forms a constituent and organic part.  And looming already on the
+horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to
+purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires&mdash;as these have
+greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal
+kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the
+action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the
+attributes at once of the hero and the martyr.  Thus, when M. Bloch and
+similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its
+pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting
+from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of
+death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what
+end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past?  For the
+sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless
+powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished?  These
+are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the
+sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all
+untouched.  Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at
+Eyiau or at Gravelotte?  Let but the cause be high, and men will find
+means to cross that zone, now as then&mdash;by the sapper's art if by no
+other!  And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its
+inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced.  The battlefield
+is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can
+contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent.  "The
+drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it
+deadens thought."  But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.
+Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in
+upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly.  Fighting for
+ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,
+knowing in his heart that they may never be at all.  Courage and
+self-renunciation have attained their height.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare
+turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and
+self-directing energy.  Contemporary history makes it daily clearer
+that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever
+did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois.  Another genius and
+another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to
+celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism
+less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone&mdash;in the hour of death
+and the hour of his birth.  Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.
+In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?
+That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the
+stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present
+onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he
+has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the
+nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being.  Made
+strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full
+splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the
+battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering
+the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and
+various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to
+nature's day.  And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have
+been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the
+least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread
+pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks
+by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of
+the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry
+"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer&mdash;in that great hour he is
+lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the
+poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes
+approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek
+orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with
+its original life&mdash;"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!
+And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"
+An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer
+on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more
+moving and a simplicity more heroic.  And these, I imagine, will be the
+results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its
+destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the
+State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its
+consummation there in the death on the battlefield.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn1text">1</A>] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the
+connecting ideas of the three dramas, <I>Phineus, Persae, Glaucus</I>.  The
+trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis
+was still fresh in every heart.  The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"
+a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years
+earlier.  The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the
+conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the
+vanquished.  The cry in the <I>Persae</I>, "+ôpaides hellénôíte+", still
+echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of
+<I>modern</I> Greece: "+deúte paides ton hellénôn+."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn2text">2</A>] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch
+alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen
+Zügen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich
+niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des öffentlichen und
+rechtlichen Lebens begründet wurden."&mdash;<I>Verfassungsgeschichte</I>, 3rd
+ed., i, p. 19; <I>cf.</I> also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene
+Kriegsvölker gegeben, gebildet durch und für den Krieg, nicht
+Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein für den Krieg
+berechnet gewesen wäre, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfürsten, deren
+Herrschaft nur in Kriegführung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn3text">3</A>] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies
+or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian,
+combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision
+in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events,
+characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or
+tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the
+test of historical criticism.  Their tactics and the composition of
+their armies make the precise share of this or that general in
+determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.
+Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the
+Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna,
+who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.
+13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster;
+and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the
+conqueror and first administrator of Irak.  The claims of Amr, or
+Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.
+638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the
+Sword of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the
+crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may
+justly entitle him to the designation&mdash;if that description can be
+applied to any one of the devoted band&mdash;of "Conqueror of Syria."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn4text">4</A>] "The twelve years of their military command (<I>i.e.</I>, of Nicephorus
+and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.
+The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the
+skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall
+not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."&mdash;Gibbon, chap. lii.  The
+reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening
+chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, <I>L'épopée
+Byzantine à la fin du dixième siècle</I>, Paris, 1896, which exhausts
+every resource of modern research into this period.  Zimisces' rise to
+power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century
+in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in
+Schlumberger's earlier volume, <I>Un Empereur byzantin</I>, Paris, 1890.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn5text">5</A>] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the
+<I>Early Kings of Norway</I>.  "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon
+the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February
+15th, 1872.&mdash;Froude, <I>Carlyle's Life in London</I>, vol. ii, p. 411.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn6text">6</A>] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a
+devil-worshipper (<I>Data of Ethics</I>, § 14) must be regarded less as an
+effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just
+retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig
+Philosophy of the eighth of the <I>Latter-Day Pamphlets</I>.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn7"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn7text">7</A>] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the
+native language of Bohemia possible.  Two volumes had already been
+issued in German.  If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had
+the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech
+version of Palacky's <I>Geschichte Böhmens</I>.  After two centuries of
+subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia
+awoke and discovered that she had a history.  Of the seven volumes of
+the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George
+of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn8"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn9"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn8text">8</A>] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the
+Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia?  "We," Tourgenieff once
+said, "we have given the samovar."  But that poet's own works, the
+symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed
+all this.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn9text">9</A>] Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of
+mediaeval Europe.  It drew its origins from southern France, arising
+partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and
+bloody strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by
+the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed
+and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the
+thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the
+year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn.  Ducange has collected
+the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's
+admirable work, <I>La Paix et la Trève de Dieu, première édition</I>, 1857,
+<I>deuxième édition revue et augmentée</I>, 1869, sketches the growth of the
+movement.  With the eleventh century, though the social misery is
+unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of
+Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be
+observed are limited to two.  But towards the close of the century the
+rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the
+movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were
+extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the
+Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection.  With the decline of
+the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the
+influence and use of the Treuga waned.  The verses of the troubadour,
+Bertrand le Born, are celebrated&mdash;"Peace is not for me, but war, war
+alone!  What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays?  And the weeks, months,
+and years, all are alike to me."  The stanza fitly expresses the way in
+which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the
+close of the twelfth century.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn10text">10</A>] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet,
+the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars.  It is thus
+synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and
+her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.
+St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.
+Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false
+impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil
+of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy.  An English
+translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the
+following characteristic title-page: "A Project for settling an
+Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and
+approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and
+now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of
+the French Academy."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn11"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn11text">11</A>] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution
+as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace.  In a discourse
+delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he
+describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the
+flourishing of science and the extinction of wars."  France, he
+declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same
+time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us
+"to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure
+prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal
+peace and harmony take place."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE VI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, July</I> 3<I>rd</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and
+traced in the second and third the development in religion and in
+politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards
+examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War
+and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and
+even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands
+attention.  How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to
+that from which all States originally derive?  How is it related to the
+Divine?  From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that
+of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of
+this Empire of Imperial Britain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the
+curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the
+deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the
+nations and the peoples of the earth?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the
+State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the
+State.  But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity
+that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it.
+Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is
+not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws
+as regulate the life of the individual.  Not only the arraignment of
+the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or
+profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle
+utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with
+the unity of the individual.  But though no composite unity is governed
+by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that
+unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as
+they change, mutually transforming and transformed.  So is this unity
+of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the
+souls of men.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ I.  THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is
+the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the
+soul of man.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,
+the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the
+higher thought of Europe.  The saint gives place to the crusader and
+scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of
+oriental paganism and oriental culture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like
+Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are
+profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature.  How shall
+the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the
+souls of men?  They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to
+dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile
+everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are
+appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by
+that Blood redeemed.  By what law or criterion of right does God send
+forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or
+bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the
+Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest
+of false prophets, Mohammed?  This trouble in the heart of the eleventh
+century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European
+imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first
+time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose
+heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was
+perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
+thought it vainly strove to imitate.  Underlying this trouble in their
+hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
+leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
+souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
+each mortal body immediately on its birth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there
+arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of
+its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children
+of men.  In the most remarkable and sublime of his six <I>Enneads</I>,
+another theory upon the same subject occurs.[<A NAME="chap06fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn1">1</A>]  The fate of the soul
+in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a
+child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in
+a foreign land.  The child forgets its country and its kindred as the
+soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one
+with the Divine.  But after the lapse of years if the child return
+amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a
+word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the
+voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose
+shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and
+gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in
+upon the child&mdash;"Behold my father and my brethren!"  So the soul of
+man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine
+wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its
+heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,
+ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew
+there within the Everlasting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the
+problem before us.  Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of
+successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,
+permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the
+contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the
+measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to
+the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the
+intelligence of the history of a day.  But as the beam of light never
+severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls within
+the caverns of the sea remains united with the orb whence it sprang, so
+the soul of man has grown old along with nature, and acquainted from
+its foundations with the fabric of the universe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Therefore when it confronts some simple object of sense or emotion, or
+the more intricate movements and events of history, or the rushing
+storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has
+within it preparations drawn from that fellowship with nature
+throughout the aeons, the abysses of Eternity.  And as the aeons
+advance, the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all its
+striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty of the ultimate
+attainment of that end increases.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its ignorance of Eternity, it
+attains its rest in the Infinite, which seeking it shall find, piercing
+through every moment of the transient to the Eternal.  What are the
+spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds to the soul which is
+ever more profoundly absorbed, remembering, knowing, or in vision made
+prescient of its identity with the soul of the universe?  And as the
+ages recede, the immanence of the Divine becomes more consciously, more
+pervadingly present.  Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its
+destiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows of twilight, or
+in mysterious tones far-borne and deep as the chords struck by the
+sweeping orbs in space.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue to the infinite,
+and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the
+ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge.  The past is dead,
+the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW
+the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the
+farthest presents, the most distant futures, are but changing phases.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If then we regard the soul, its origin and its destiny, in this manner,
+what a wonder of light invests its history within Time!  Banished from
+its primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with what
+achievements has not the exile graced the earth, its habitation!
+Wondrous indeed is man's course across the earth, and with what shall
+the works of his soul be compared?  From those first uncertainties,
+those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly discerned as yet, lures him
+with tremulous ecstasies to eternise the fleeting, and in columned
+enclosure and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can control of
+the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.
+These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding
+his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by
+reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the
+worlds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn
+granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of
+Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed
+splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,
+iridescent with diamond and pearl.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and
+moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by
+the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of
+the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer
+wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,
+and Shakespeare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and
+tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain
+its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on
+the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in
+wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last&mdash;in the
+<I>adagio</I> of the great Concerto, in the <I>Requiem</I>, or those later
+strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the
+soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the
+shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,
+pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses&mdash;how dark,
+how silent!&mdash;a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first
+separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the
+ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and
+precursor yet shall know!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things
+more excellent than man, the planets, for instance.  He is thinking of
+the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the
+keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not
+unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are
+living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and
+that fixed path athwart the night.  How much higher a will that
+steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable
+desires of human life.  But we know that the planet with all its mighty
+curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the
+moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark
+unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy
+imaginings, is accomplished.  And the thought of Pascal which might be
+a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the
+universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than
+the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to
+destroy the universe knows nothing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded
+and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it
+is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the
+State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should
+baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce
+them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false
+analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has
+in these lectures more than once been made.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual
+soul, and thence to the Divine unity.  The soul of the State is the
+higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of
+the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that
+we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual
+life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State
+in itself and by itself.  Man in such relations does often merit the
+reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of
+a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems
+often to find justification.  Similarly, the exclusive admiration of
+many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as
+opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,
+discovers in a first study of these relations strong support.  But the
+artist is not isolated and self-dependent.  If the supreme act of a
+race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme
+poems, its language&mdash;deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race
+has contributed&mdash;so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State
+affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most
+independent of the State.  The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The
+solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether
+of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that
+Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into
+the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by
+ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the
+structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that
+isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[<A NAME="chap06fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn2">2</A>]  And
+who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that
+lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the
+State?  For from the same source the component and the composite, the
+constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence
+that is in each is One.  "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or
+whither shall I flee from Thy presence?  If I ascend up into heaven,
+Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.  If I
+take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
+sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold
+me.  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall
+be light about me.  Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the
+night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to
+Thee."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives
+whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not
+write the <I>Ajax</I> because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, <I>El
+Condennado</I> because Cortez defeated Montezuma.  Whatever law connect
+greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause
+and effect, of necessary succession in time.  They are the mutually
+dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the
+whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose
+being are beyond the region of cause and effect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of
+the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the
+Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between
+the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the
+State.  The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action,
+or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident
+with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development
+the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire.  For it
+is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the
+energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds
+expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and
+art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the
+individual.  But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the
+art of Sophocles <I>caused</I> by Marathon; but the <I>Agamemnon</I> and Salamis,
+the Parthenon and the <I>Ajax</I>, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or
+in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the
+Hellenes.  A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,
+thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.
+Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo
+and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence
+competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the
+actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest.  So in Venetian
+history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which
+succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the
+painting but to the political greatness of Venice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As in civic so in national empires.  In Spain, Charles V and the
+Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of
+the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and
+Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez.  Racine and Molière
+serve <I>le grand Monarque</I>, as Apelles served Alexander.  The mariners
+who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to
+the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries
+of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their
+literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chénier and
+the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just.  An empire so glorious, if
+based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the
+age its sworn antagonist.  This stamped his empire as spurious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in
+action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect.  For the
+roots of their identity we must search deeper.  The transcendent deed
+and the work of art alike have their origin in the <I>élan</I> of the soul,
+the diviner vision or the diviner desire.  The will which becomes the
+deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet
+one; and this <I>élan</I>, this energy of the soul, what is it but the
+energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time?
+Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration,
+imperfect, of the spirit of man.  The greatest books that ever were
+written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most
+delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever
+came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the
+soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them.  The
+unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works
+is dimly adumbrated.  The most perfect statue is but an imperfect
+semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying
+and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward
+vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic
+height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself supremely, and with a
+flame-like vividness.  There the divine origin of the State which in
+the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of
+art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic
+action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned.  If
+artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the
+Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar.
+The thought and the deed, +lógos kaì poíêsis+, here are one.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+We have now reached the final stage of our inquiry.  Is there any law
+by which the vicissitudes of the States, whose origin has been traced
+through the individual to a remoter and more awful source, are fixed
+and directed?  And can the decay of empires, those supreme forms in the
+development of States, be resolved into its determining causes, or do
+we here confront a movement which is beyond the sphere ruled by cause
+and effect?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Western Europe a broken arch and some fragments of stone are often
+all that mark the place where stood some perfect achievement of
+mediaeval architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey.  But on the
+lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a ruin hardly more
+conspicuous may denote the seat of an empire.  Such a region, fronting
+the desert, formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon his
+own destiny and that of the nations.  Those two inquiries have
+proceeded together.  His vision of the universe, original or accepted,
+inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the
+historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in
+time and space.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,
+Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or
+applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the
+present hour.  Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations
+of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of
+Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a
+divine vengeance.  The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and
+of wrong-doing.  The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption
+and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.
+Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the
+individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's
+history been decreed and proclaimed.  Hebrew thought was perplexed and
+amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and
+the unjust man, and the misery of the good.  But the sublime and
+inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the
+punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and
+States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout
+Greek and Roman thought.  In St. Augustine it reappears in its original
+shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of
+an historical argument.  A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful
+sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted
+by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,
+attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the
+Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it.  He sees Rome fall;
+and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome
+becomes to Augustinus&mdash;the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of
+her pride, her idolatry, and her sin.  Rome falls as Babylon, as
+Assyria fell; but in the <I>De Civitate</I>, to which he devotes some
+fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass
+away.[<A NAME="chap06fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn3">3</A>] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces
+with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for the theme
+of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a
+scroll.  Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a
+procession of empires&mdash;Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,
+and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of
+Charlemagne and of the Othos.  Their successive falls point to man's
+obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of
+the Judgment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[<A NAME="chap06fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn4">4</A>] and of the Cardinal
+Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century
+Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive
+and finished than that of Augustine himself.  In recent times this
+theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and
+Carlyle.  It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, <I>The
+Stones of Venice</I>.  The value of that work is imperishable, because the
+documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and
+sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison.  Yet its
+philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,
+and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master.  The
+bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever
+permitted himself to imagine.  In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates
+the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is
+that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era
+lies the salvation of England.  Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its
+great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of
+the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of
+Christianism of which that standard was the emblem.  But in the
+sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the
+consequence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State
+identical with that indicated in the second lecture.  They exhibit the
+effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a
+design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or
+ought to be.  Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty
+aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind
+assaults of fate and man.  In individual life, therefore, the primitive
+conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life
+of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the
+succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts,
+creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of
+phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the
+narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from
+detection.  Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire,
+and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the
+grave.  And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured
+amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier
+heights and the icy solitudes of thought.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 4.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls
+the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons
+and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.  This theory varies little;
+the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer
+change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato
+or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or
+in the sentimental musings of Volney.  The vicissitudes are no more
+determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain
+ethical rules.  Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme
+of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws.  The
+mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with
+the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It appears late in the development of Hebrew thought, and finds its
+most remarkable expression in the fragment, the writer of which is now
+not unfrequently spoken of as "Khoëleth."[<A NAME="chap06fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn5">5</A>]  "One generation passeth
+away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.
+The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place,
+where he arose.  The wind goeth towards the south and turneth about
+unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
+again according to his circuits.  The thing that hath been, it is that
+which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done,
+and there is no new thing under the sun.  Is there anything whereof it
+may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which
+was before us.  There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall
+there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that
+shall come after."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as
+Khoëleth, brooding on the same world-wide things.  Like him, he looks
+out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;
+like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in
+their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the
+history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its
+circles, <I>sov&#259;v sov&#257;v</I>, and returneth to the place whence it
+came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal
+the tedious story of man.  In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,
+tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception
+recurs.  It is the central and informing thought of his life as a
+philosophical thinker.  But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming
+the slave of a theory.  He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle
+in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence
+if not rest.  Its precise character he nowhere describes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.
+He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the
+gloomy energy which hate supplies.  In depth and variety of creative
+insight he approaches Balzac,[<A NAME="chap06fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn6">6</A>] whilst in his peculiar province, the
+psychology of death, he stands alone.  His is the most profoundly
+imaginative nature that Rome produced.  Three centuries before the fall
+of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns
+to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in
+the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the
+fourth.  Both his great works, the <I>Histories</I> and the <I>Annals</I>, read
+at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,
+the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the <I>deûm ira in rem Romanam</I> of
+the <I>Annals</I>; whilst in the <I>Histories</I> the theory of retribution
+appears in the reflection, <I>non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,
+esse ultionem</I>, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the
+havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba&mdash;"Not our preservation, but
+their own vengeance, do the gods desire."  It is as if, transported in
+imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the
+judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint
+Augustine.  Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and
+of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the
+wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits
+of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing.  His
+sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and
+deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A passage in the <I>Annals</I> may fitly represent the impression of reserve
+which these three mighty spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,
+at moments convey.  "Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in incerto
+judicium est, fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte
+volvantur; quippe sapientissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum
+aemulantur, diversos reperias, ac multis insitam opinionem non initia
+nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis curae; ideo creberrime
+tristia in bonos, laeta apud deteriores esse; contra alii fatum quidem
+congruere rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud principia
+et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen electionem vitae nobis
+relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, certum imminentium ordinem; neque mala
+vel bona quae vulgus putet."[<A NAME="chap06fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn7">7</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence
+upon Thucydides.  It even forces the structure of his later books into
+the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a
+verse of Sophocles the theme.  But his earlier and greater manner
+prevails, and from the study of his work the mind passes easily to the
+contemplation of the doom which awaited the destroyers of Athens, the
+monstrous tyrannies in Syracuse, and Lacedaemon's swift ruin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves attention.  It was a
+habit of writers of the eighteenth century, in treating of the
+vicissitudes of empires, to state one problem and solve another.  The
+question asked was, "Is there a law regulating the fall of empires?";
+but the question answered, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, was, "Is
+there a remedy?"  Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in places to refer
+the ruin which he anticipated to Rome's departure from the austerity
+and simplicity of the early centuries.  In the luxury of the Caesars he
+discerns but another condemnation of the policy of Caius Julius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The use which Gibbon has made of this argument is celebrated.  In
+Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan
+and of Marcus, exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for
+the Republic exercises over the art and thought of Tacitus.  Both
+desiderate a world which is not now, musing with fierce bitterness or
+cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer.  Both
+ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted?  How
+could the decline of Rome have been stayed?"  Tacitus is the greater
+poet&mdash;more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,
+profounder in his insight into the human heart.  But a common
+atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and
+again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work
+gains thereby.  A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's
+<I>Trionfi</I>, or the <I>Antiquités de Rome</I> of Joachim du Bellay, redeems
+from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march
+of many a balanced period.[<A NAME="chap06fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn8">8</A>]  But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for
+a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic
+theory of the decline of empires.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic
+purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and
+the bent of his own intellect.  He combats the same enemy as Voltaire
+waged truceless war upon&mdash;the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of
+insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and
+religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
+derived their power.  And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.
+There is scarcely a living conception in the <I>Decline and Fall</I> which
+cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.
+Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a
+section in the <I>Essai sur les Moeurs</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient
+simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[<A NAME="chap06fn9text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn9">9</A>]  With Zosimus
+he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,
+and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred
+defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.
+This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the
+furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the
+great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail
+lavished upon the portraits of their enemies.  Half-seriously,
+half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in
+Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of
+the Antonines.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the
+decline of Venice to its abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,
+influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall
+of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 5.  WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the
+cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth
+and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that
+the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be
+averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified.  The
+mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall
+endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.
+He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the
+government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.
+And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still
+proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or
+surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the
+passing of youth.  Man might as well start once more to discover the
+elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that
+shall not pass away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like
+pondering too curiously the question why a man dies.  In the
+vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as
+in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life.  The tracts and
+regions governed by cause and effect are behind us.  An empire, like a
+work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an
+integral portion or phase of that end.  From the concept, "Empire,"
+duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in
+the concept itself.  Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are
+alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself
+through the individual in the State.  The curve of an empire's history
+is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes.  It is a portion of
+the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades
+analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul
+which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of
+a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to
+the heart's desire, is vain enough.  The Eros of Praxiteles and the
+Athênê of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,
+are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover
+the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus.  But the moment within the soul of
+the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and
+completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision
+has not passed away.  It has become part of the eternal, as the
+aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or
+Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal.  Man, born into a
+world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments
+the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed.  The artist,
+the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world.  Yet is
+this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and
+change.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes
+itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art.  The form perishes,
+nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,
+endures.  As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the
+individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or
+imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race.  It
+is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative
+purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.
+The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it.  Athênê or Roma
+are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most
+subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from
+myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded.  Those
+heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a
+Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the
+State to itself, rudely or faultlessly.  Philip and Alexander, Baber
+and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than
+other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.
+The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men.  To
+Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all
+brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is
+an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the
+Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas.  Akbar started as his
+grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[<A NAME="chap06fn10text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn10">10</A>]
+But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or
+heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of
+earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled
+for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon.  Apprehending the unity
+beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,
+Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and
+essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had
+done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal
+beneficence, and truth, and life.  He failed, but failed greatly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in
+thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of
+humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither
+converge again.  Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in
+terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of
+Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas
+as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven
+into a chain of causes and effects.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human
+thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things.  As
+life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of
+human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize
+itself and life.  Every effect is in turn a cause.  Therefore every
+cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and
+simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued
+life of the cause.  Universes and the soul of man are but
+self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within
+Cause immortal, effect within effect unending.  "Man," it has been
+said, "is the inventor of Nothingness.  Nature and the Universe know it
+not."  The past wields over the present a power which could never be
+derived from Death and Nothingness.  No age, as was pointed out in the
+first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present.  As if
+we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of
+the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the
+scenes designed for other eyes.  Even our most living impulses we
+interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,
+so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were
+dead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when
+most deeply absorbed in the past.  The soul of man is the true Logos of
+the universe.  It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of
+the aeons is it a stranger.  It heard the informing voice which
+instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the
+bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and
+the hills about them like a covering of flesh.  Therefore time and
+death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets
+over against the substance which lives and is eternally.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than
+elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,
+the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change
+them, and they shall be changed," seems realized.  The death of a
+State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which
+a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their
+ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is
+secured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled
+splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary
+eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,
+which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become
+the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse
+phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."
+Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs
+pursued&mdash;tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,
+national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of
+glorious wisdom&mdash;all or any of these might have warded off the doom of
+Portugal and of the house of Avis.  Bur these things were not in the
+blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da
+Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral.  It is as vain to seek in
+depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the
+Inquisition or the Papal power.  Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,
+would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be
+overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the
+nation which creates it.  If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the
+soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the
+question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which
+acts in this manner?  What is the ideal powerful enough to make the
+hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?
+The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[<A NAME="chap06fn11text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn11">11</A>] is not
+a nation of adventurers.  Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the
+Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here.  Dom Sebastian's
+device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of
+which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero&mdash;"A
+glorious death makes the whole life glorious."  And the genius of the
+nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death.  To Portugal Dom
+Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the
+far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,
+whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of
+Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few
+faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their
+fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever
+is memorable in their later history.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,
+which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths.  Spain, as
+Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as
+England acted.  Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the
+Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power
+pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and
+for two generations made the Crusades live again.  It is another
+Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness.  She defies
+Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[<A NAME="chap06fn12text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn12">12</A>] as she had
+defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,
+in the life of States and in human destiny.  Roman grandeur is not dead
+whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive.  To Petrarch
+the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,
+and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for
+humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her
+language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other
+races and to other times.  In the world's <I>palaestra</I> she had thrown
+the <I>discus</I> to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as
+Rome was dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle to
+surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this
+Empire of Britain?  In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception
+of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending
+over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the
+still brow the secret of his own destiny.  Rome does not die there.
+Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and
+all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six
+hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most
+penetrating, and all-informing.  Roman definiteness of thought and act
+were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.
+From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative
+justice is born.  Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius
+which was Rome still pulses within it.  By the energy of feudalism the
+ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.
+Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the
+famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills
+with its radiance a darkened world.  Religious oppression is stayed,
+but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,
+what a temple is reared for it by the Seine!  And now in this era, and
+at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more
+alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely
+to make here its lasting mansionry.  For in very truth, in all that
+freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,
+is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the
+vanguard of humanity?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,
+of Assyria.  In her purposes their purposes lived.  Mediaeval
+imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome.  In Britain the
+spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation.  The form decays, the
+divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,
+indestructible.  And thus the destiny of empires involves the
+consideration of the destiny of man.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn1text">1</A>] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical
+text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as
+follows:
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-154"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-154.jpg" ALT="Greek text" BORDER="" WIDTH="439" HEIGHT="129">
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn2text">2</A>] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et
+agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs
+better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism
+of the State.  Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.
+Spinoza, if this were written <I>circa</I> 1665, has in view, perhaps, the
+Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port
+Royal aux Champs.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn3text">3</A>] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast
+intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance
+which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the
+imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe
+alone of moderns have the power to reproduce.  The <I>De Civitate</I> is his
+greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in
+intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery
+and diction.  The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and
+the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has
+curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan
+poetry.  Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme.  Criticism
+indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the
+comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the
+men of after times who loved them most&mdash;Tacitus and St. Augustine,
+Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn4text">4</A>] The <I>World-History</I> of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the <I>De
+Civitate</I> of St. Augustine.  He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"
+<I>i.e.</I>, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval
+standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the
+year A.D. 1146.  His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the
+Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole.  He is uncritical in
+the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his
+habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval
+monastery invests the work.  In the following year he started on the
+crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote
+his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the
+emperor Barbarossa.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn5text">5</A>] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this
+word have all been disputed.  Thus the use of the original is
+convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories
+of theologians or Hebraists.  Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with
+scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses
+both erudition and charm.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn6text">6</A>] What figures from the <I>Comédie Humaine</I> of Roman society of the
+first century throng the pages of Tacitus&mdash;Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso,
+Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo,
+Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women
+of the <I>Annals</I>&mdash;imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or
+loyal&mdash;Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of
+Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia
+Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn7"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn7text">7</A>] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the
+earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as
+follows:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine
+judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and
+immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and
+fortune.  For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted
+wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do
+varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods
+have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all.
+Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with
+so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so
+great prosperities.  Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and
+destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at
+all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of
+naturall causes as from their beginning.  And these graunt withall,
+that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being
+once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our
+end.  Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the
+vulgar do so call."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile
+commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the
+sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn8"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn8text">8</A>] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's <I>Triumphs</I>.
+The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in
+the studied pages of his confessional&mdash;the Latin treatise <I>De Contemptu
+Mundi</I>&mdash;pervades these exquisite poems.  Du Bellay's <I>Antiquities</I>,
+which Spenser's translation under the title of <I>The Ruines of Rome</I> has
+made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon
+the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558.  The beautiful
+<I>Songe sur Rome</I> accompanied them.  Two years later Du Bellay, then in
+his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died.  The preciousness of these
+poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend
+of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's <I>Ballades</I> to the
+passing of empires and of Rome.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn9"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn9text">9</A>] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of
+Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official
+of high rank at Constantinople.  The fifth and sixth books deal with
+the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city
+by Alaric (A.D. 395-410).  Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the
+revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new
+religion.  The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the
+brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship
+and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing
+designs of the Emperor Julian.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn10text">10</A>] Baber's own memoirs, <I>Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber,
+emperor of Hindustan</I>, one of the priceless documents of history, show
+the manner in which he conceived his mission.  Here is his account of
+the supreme incident in his spiritual life; "In January, 1527,
+messengers came from Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of
+Mewar, and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the west.  On
+February 11th I went forth to the Holy War.  On the 25th I mounted to
+survey my posts, and during the ride I was struck with the reflection
+that I had always resolved to make an effectual repentance at some
+period of my life.  I now spoke with myself thus&mdash;'O my soul, how long
+wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin?  Not bitter is repentance:
+then taste it thou!  Since the day wherein thou didst set forth on a
+Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes for thy salvation.
+And he who sacrificeth his life to save his soul shall attain that
+exalted state thou wottest of.'  Then I sent for the gold and the
+silver goblets, and broke them, and drank wine no more, and purified my
+heart.  And having thus heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings
+of peace, and being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I
+commanded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war against the
+evil in our hearts."  Such was the mood in which, on the 24th of the
+first Jemadi, A.H. 933, Baber proceeded to found the Mogul Empire.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn11"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn12"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn11text">11</A>] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles
+south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578.  The king, Dom
+Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.
+As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal
+which had not its dead to mourn.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn12text">12</A>] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,
+along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most
+memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying
+lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting
+has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger
+Cagliari.  Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the
+seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605.  It consists of two works&mdash;the
+<I>Tractate</I> and the <I>Considerations</I>&mdash;and probably of a third drawn up
+for the secret use of the Council of Ten.  Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems
+to have lived with a pen in his hand.  His manuscripts in the Venice
+archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes.  The first collected edition
+of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the
+Bastille.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LECTURE VII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+[<I>Tuesday, July</I> 10<I>th</I>, 1900]
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast
+through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of
+things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires
+exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual
+happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,
+unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history
+to the present hour.  They are ancient as the rocks and their musings
+from eternity, inextinguishable as the <I>élan</I> of the soul imprisoned in
+time towards that which is beyond time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to
+render the value of Reality&mdash;I had almost said of the real
+Illusion&mdash;more poignant.  Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are
+mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[<A NAME="chap07fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn1">1</A>]
+when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the
+study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or
+life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers.  Nothing so
+instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under
+"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,
+states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such
+attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the
+ordinances of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.<BR>
+Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[<A NAME="chap07fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn2">2</A>]<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Nor does this result in the mood of Candide.  The effort unconquered
+and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it
+is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in
+very truth it is.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus we are prepared to consider the following question.  Given that
+death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will
+this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall?  Will the form
+it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of
+Akbar, have passed away?  The question resolves itself into two
+parts&mdash;in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist?  And,
+secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or
+gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to
+determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or
+Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§1.  THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+First of all with regard to the former question.  Recent studies in
+ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies
+of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not
+the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of
+recently civilized races.  Yet this assumption still underlies much of
+the current speculation on the subject.  Last century it was received
+as an axiomatic truth.  Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic
+interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in
+them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus.  Not only
+Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,
+as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.
+Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their
+customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and <I>littérateurs</I>
+indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi
+they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document
+lasting as the <I>Germania</I>.  Such comparisons are still at times made,
+but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;
+both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only
+in appearance.  It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood
+and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with
+many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius.  It
+is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the
+youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in
+refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of
+political energy.  The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like
+Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of
+philosophy.  Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor
+"Wertherism" for the battlefield.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth
+consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to
+frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great
+political end.  Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the
+influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a
+youthful race.  The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in
+Europe.  Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its
+society alike attest this.  Superstition is not youth, else we might
+look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the
+cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future.  And
+prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be
+governed, as the genius to govern others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown
+that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,
+either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities
+of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as
+was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,
+and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the
+Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad.  It is
+a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not
+only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in
+individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments
+of history and of life, the original stock asserts itself.  The State
+is young; but the race is precisely of the same remoteness as Britain
+and the Greater Britain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Passing to the second point&mdash;at what epoch do we now stand as compared
+with Rome or Islam?  It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged
+empire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly rest upon a
+misapprehension, first, of the period in which the Nation of England
+strictly speaking arises, and secondly, of the period in which the
+Empire of Britain arises.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The traditional date of the landing of Hengist does not indicate a
+moment analogous to the moment in the history of Rome marked by the
+traditional date of the foundation of the city.  The date 776 B.C.
+marks the close of a process of transformation and slow revolving unity
+extending over centuries, so that the era of Romulus and the early
+kings, Numa, Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch in Rome's
+history analogous to the period in England's history between Senlac and
+the constitutional struggle of the thirteenth century.  The former is
+the period in which the civic unity of Rome is completed.  The latter
+is the period in which the national unity of England is completed.
+Rome is now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, <I>urbs
+Roma</I>, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is finally
+conscious to itself of its career as a nation.  Magna Carta and the
+constitutional struggle which followed may be said to determine the
+course of the national and political life of England as much as the
+Servian Code founded the civic unity and determined the character of
+the constitutional life of Rome.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, as was pointed out in an earlier lecture, already in Rome and in
+England there are premonitions, foreshadowings of the future.  The
+design of the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal
+city, and the devotion of the <I>gens Fabia</I> announces the Roman legion.
+And in those wars of Creçy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless
+heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the
+chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the
+squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of
+fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"?  And in 1381,
+the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of
+the archers of Creçy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and
+wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of
+England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism
+and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and
+warlike of the present hour?  So that even as a nation, about eighteen
+generations may be said to sum England's life, whilst, as we have seen,
+Britain's conscious life as an empire extends backwards but to three
+generations or to four.  Thus if the question were asked, With what
+period in the history of Rome does the present age correspond?  I
+should say, roughly speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus
+and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three hundred years to
+run; and in the history of Islam, with the period of the early
+Abbassides, when the fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four
+centuries removed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Does this justify us in inferring that the course which England has to
+run will extend still over three centuries and that then England too
+will pass away, as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away?  So
+far as the determination of the eras in our history which correspond in
+development to eras in the history of Rome or of Islam is concerned,
+the inference from analogy possesses a certain validity.  And the
+accidental or fixed resemblances between the empires of Islam,[<A NAME="chap07fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn3">3</A>] Rome,
+and Imperial Britain are numerous and striking enough to render such
+comparisons of real significance to speculative politics.  But the
+similarity in structural expansion or in environment which can be
+traced throughout the completed dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found
+only in the initial stages of Imperial Britain.  Then the argument from
+analogy fails, and our judgment is at a stand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Assuming that each imperial race starts its career dowered with a vital
+capacity of definite range, and allowing for the necessary divergences
+in their course between a civic and a national state.  Imperial
+Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the present era to have
+reached a stage represented by the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to
+proceed further is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that now
+arises between the circumstances of the two empires.  During the
+present century the vast transformations which have been effected by
+science in the surroundings of man's physical life make all speculation
+upon the duration of Imperial Britain by analogies drawn from the
+duration either of Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The growth of the idea of freedom, and the modern interpretation of
+that idea in the spirit of Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the
+English nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks to a
+degree unparalleled in the ancient world.  The self-recuperative powers
+of the race have been strengthened by the course of its political and
+religious history.  Fresh blood adds new energy to effete stocks.  The
+effect of this restorative power from within is heightened in manifold
+ways by such a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomotion
+which have arisen during the past two generations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the age of the first conscious beginnings of Imperial Britain, the
+communication between the regions of the empire was as difficult as in
+the Rome of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness has been
+synchronous, not only with increased intercourse between the ranks of
+the same nation, but with increased intercourse between all the various
+climes of an empire upon which the sun never sets.  From city to city,
+from town to town, from province to province, from colony to colony,
+emigration and immigration, change and interchange of vast masses of
+the population are incessant.  This increased intercommunication
+between the various members of the race, the influences of the change
+of climate upon the individual, aided by such imperceptible but
+many-sided forces as spring from the diffusion of knowledge and
+culture, mark a revolution in the vital resources and the environment
+in the British, as distinguished from the Saracenic or Roman race, so
+extraordinary that all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated
+is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses as to be useless
+or misleading.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nature seems pondering some vast and new experiment, and an empire has
+arisen whose future course, whether we consider its political or its
+economic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves conjecture
+behind.  The world-stage is set as for the opening of a drama which, at
+least in the magnitude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance
+of its action, will make the former achievements of men dwindle and
+seem of little account.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 2.  THE DESTINY OF MAN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections,"
+by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial
+Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as
+we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of
+past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to
+the destiny of man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had
+left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision
+of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther
+from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair
+of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus
+Lucretius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden
+receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the
+dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or
+philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the
+Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western
+Isles.  Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which
+awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,
+as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which
+Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which
+Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian
+dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and
+of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,
+perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of
+poetry.  In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul
+at death.  Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from
+this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,
+which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances
+swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial
+Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future.  Thus, as the
+immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the
+desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so
+has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope.  Man,
+tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least
+intimations of Reality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the
+interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain
+characteristics in common.  From far behind to far in front the dream
+has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to
+horizon, but it remains one dream.  The earthly Paradise of the social
+reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and
+devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic
+evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding
+from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy
+and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the
+Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but
+in diminished beauty and poetry.  The dream of unending progress is
+vain as the dream of unending regress.[<A NAME="chap07fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn4">4</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile
+are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued
+bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with
+delineations of torment and endless woe.  And Aeschylus has remarked,
+and La Rochefoucauld and Helvétius bear him out, how much easier a man
+finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in
+his joy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the
+depravity of the human heart.  They are the recognition by the dark
+Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the
+Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to
+the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on
+this earth, perfect peace is a mockery.  But in Time, misery is the
+soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments
+of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative.  They are the
+moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from
+stress of agony or delight or mere weariness.  Therefore with
+stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to
+grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;
+therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell
+succeeds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the
+infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the
+soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable
+of the only reality, the Eternal Now.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 3.  THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the
+Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most
+significant features of the present age.  Its dominion over art,
+literature, religion, can no longer escape us.  It is the dominant note
+of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of
+the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides
+itself.  A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a
+consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations
+of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal.  The European of that
+age is a visionary.  The unseen world is to him more real than the
+seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the
+soul from earth to heaven.  The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw
+night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining
+battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the
+world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and
+Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times
+looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but
+phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of
+the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour
+is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable
+pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,
+his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the
+ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in
+accepted defeat or in formulated despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the <I>Wahn</I> of religious
+freedom.  The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,
+crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes&mdash;but shall not
+the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the
+pure faith of primitive times?  When the last of the scholastics was
+being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless
+task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of
+four centuries.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort
+of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,
+nearer to the truth.  The successive phases of this struggle may be
+compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and
+setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,
+the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and
+Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,
+learned the value of the word of a king.  Martin Luther is the
+protagonist of the first of the four great dramas that follow.  Its
+theme is the consecration of man to sincerity in his relations to God.
+There, even at the hazard of death, the tongue shall utter what the
+heart thinks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The second drama is named <I>Ignatius Loyola</I>; the theme is not less
+absorbing&mdash;"Art thou then so sure of the truth and of thy sincerity, O
+my brother?"  Whatever his followers may have become, Don Inigo remains
+one of the most baffling enigmas that historical psychology offers.
+From his grave he rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are the
+acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of the third drama&mdash;Thurn,
+Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Condé, Oxenstiern!
+And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the conflict between
+moribund Jesuitism and Protestantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay
+aside their masks in the world's great tiring-room of death, a new Age
+in world-history has begun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As religious freedom is the <I>Wahn</I> of the Reformation drama, so it is
+in political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself.
+Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use
+of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the
+dark places of the world!  This is the new avatar, this the glad
+tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age.  Of
+this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most
+perfect expression.  What is this faith for which Condorcet and his
+party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the
+guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths&mdash;Vergniaud,
+Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, Gensonné, Pétion, Buzot, Isnard?
+"Oh Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!" was not a reproach,
+but, in the gladness of the martyr's death which consecrated all the
+life, it was the wonder, the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace
+in some deeper reconcilement.  Behold how strong is their faith!  Marie
+Antoinette has her faith, the injunction of her priest, "When in doubt
+or in affliction, think of Calvary."  Yet the hair of the Queen
+whitens, her spirit despairs.  The Girondinist queen climbing the
+scaffold, not less a lover of love and of life than Marie
+Antoinette&mdash;what nerves her?  It is the star of the future and the
+memory of Vergniaud's phrase, "Posterity?  What have we to do with
+posterity?  Perish our memory, but let France be free!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these
+men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,
+witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other
+two for which saint and reformer died!  And their battle-march, which
+is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,
+the vision of the future of the world, which closes <I>Hellas</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith
+that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in
+political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.
+Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age&mdash;"Blessed are the young,
+for their eyes shall behold it"&mdash;and upon the ruins of the Bastille
+Charles James Fox sees it arise.  "By how much," he writes to a friend,
+"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!"  Its
+presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed.  Wordsworth,
+Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants&mdash;for a time!
+The <I>Wahn</I> of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human
+heart!  First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth&mdash;Freedom!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath
+to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its
+poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy.  It is the
+faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart
+Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the
+Girondins.  For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the
+federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the
+Second Age pass.  Not in political any more than in religious freedom
+could man's unrest find a panacea.  The new heavens and the new earth
+which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw
+beyond the sunset.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And knowledge&mdash;of what avail is knowledge?&mdash;or to scan the abysses of
+space and search the depths of time?  If the utmost dreams of science,
+and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if
+the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of
+every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure
+analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the
+annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle
+brought within our scrutiny&mdash;it still would leave the spirit
+unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its
+infinitude.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age
+are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet.  As Mirabeau, the
+intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that
+principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,
+from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in
+its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that
+<I>bienfaisance</I> which the Abbé de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be
+styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond
+the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood.  In over a
+hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,
+Condorcet disseminates his ideas&mdash;fortnightly pamphlets, many of them
+even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his
+faith&mdash;kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,
+education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free
+trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind.  It is in
+this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central
+thought of his system is developed.  He may have derived it from
+Turgot,[<A NAME="chap07fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn5">5</A>] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest
+biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later
+writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to
+scientific rule and line his living thought.  Where they most are
+faithful, there his followers are greatest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find
+scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the
+speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume
+after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,
+only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,
+tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of
+earlier times.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an
+eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that
+there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.
+A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,
+recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has
+invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting
+and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of
+Phidias.  In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat
+of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of
+Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of
+the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius
+imparts.[<A NAME="chap07fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn6">6</A>]  But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade
+the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek
+its peace where he himself had found it, in Art.  So the labour of the
+scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's
+spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.
+The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working
+obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in
+the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence
+in proclaiming its unknowableness.  Glimmerings from the Eternal visit
+the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the
+incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it
+were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 4.  THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the
+Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined.  For the
+soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the
+deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the
+body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,
+sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in
+Time nor its going down in Space.  Nor is it in knowledge, whether of
+the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,
+legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a
+vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not.  Then
+instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or
+theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which
+man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being
+play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a
+scroll.  The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an
+azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced
+in ecstasy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the
+prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,
+but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that
+Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time
+realizes as the Deed.  Man looks to the future and the coming of
+Eternity.  How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?
+Behold, the Eternal is <I>now</I>, and the Infinite is <I>here</I>.  And if the
+high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the
+worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the
+dreamer and the dream are God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.
+There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins.  And thus the
+spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in
+defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,
+flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn.  Man's
+spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an
+ever deeper reality.  The race, too, like the individual and the
+nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy.  Once more, in the way of a
+thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning
+manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless
+can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms
+of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back
+upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite
+through the finite.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This mystic attribute, this <I>élan</I> of the soul, discovers a fellowship
+in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment.  It is,
+for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[<A NAME="chap07fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn7">7</A>] Flaubert,
+and Carlyle possess in common[<A NAME="chap07fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn8">8</A>].  These men are not as others of their
+time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,
+whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the
+Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of
+the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the
+monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,
+the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course
+curiously similar.  Flaubert has a wider range and more varied
+sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally
+surpasses him.  Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in
+ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the
+dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage
+from the <I>Correspondance</I> of Flaubert in his first manhood.  In Saint
+Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as
+Carlyle found in Cromwell.  To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to
+that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of
+time?  Man's path is to the Eternal&mdash;<I>dem Grabe hinan</I>&mdash;and from the
+study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same
+embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if, in such later works as Flaubert's <I>Bouvard et Pécuchet</I> and the
+<I>Latter-Day Pamphlets</I> of Carlyle, only the difference between the two
+minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in
+temperament.  It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the
+artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the
+same&mdash;the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite
+and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the
+transient.  Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with
+which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of
+modern science and mechanical invention.  But whether surveyed with
+contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an
+unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the
+same&mdash;"the eternities, the immensities."[<A NAME="chap07fn9text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn9">9</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of
+Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies.  Love's mystery is
+deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch
+by the breath of the grave.  The desire of the infinite greatens the
+beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural
+radiance.  All knowledge there becomes wonder.  Truth is not known, but
+the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with
+it eternally.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists,
+formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the
+worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of
+the infinite.  The achievements in art most distinctive of the present
+age&mdash;the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance&mdash;proclaim
+the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the
+immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,
+the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of
+unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the
+retina of the eye.  "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw
+a line," said Hokousai.  It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to
+create a world."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift
+influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply
+defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be
+hard to over-estimate.  The nation undowered with such an ideal,
+menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a
+protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in
+the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and
+commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics
+from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public
+affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their
+characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell.  For
+not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this
+conception robed in something of its initial wonder.  These, the
+individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,
+aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the
+divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism
+itself.  Life is greatened.  The ardour of the periods of history most
+memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the
+energy of the Renaissance.  A higher mood than that of the England of
+Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day.  Man's true peace is
+not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a
+work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to
+the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion
+of the world, but of God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,
+one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"
+in Algernon Sidney's phrase&mdash;how can the issue and event be other than
+auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men?  As Puritanism
+seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of
+the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.
+Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the
+"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and
+Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,
+wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that
+passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 5.  THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above
+speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the
+soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist.  It is an
+affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,
+the <I>Demiourgos</I>, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts
+of men.  "Im Anfang war die That."  The "deed" is nearer the eternal
+fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that
+work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in
+this or that deed.  In painting, that impressionism which loves the
+line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its
+emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine
+thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter
+flows.  A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's
+lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into
+living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from
+which, in such a work as <I>Tristan</I>, or as <I>Parsifal</I>, that art's
+ecstasy or mystery derives.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always
+been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure.  Indefiniteness is far from
+proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal.  "A
+man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know
+whither he is going."  What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours
+of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man
+and the limited, precise ends of common days.  Upon such a subject
+Cromwell has the right to speak.  Great himself, he was the cause of
+the greatness that was in others.  But in all things it was still
+Jehovah that worked in him.  Deeply penetrated with this belief,
+Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his
+thought.  Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in
+the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free.  The
+conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the
+world.  The individual will stands aside.  The Will of the universe
+advances.  Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark
+background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in
+mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings
+to this high, dread, and austere power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So of empires, of races, and of nations.  A race never goes so far as
+when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the
+consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little
+way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final
+task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.
+Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of
+the divine purposes.  It is the identity of the desire of the race with
+the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the
+motion of tides and of planets.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of
+the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those
+empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw
+ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to
+live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black
+portals of the future&mdash;what image is this which of itself starts within
+the mind?  Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the
+amphitheatre of Rome?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and
+public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated
+through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is
+enacted.  Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a
+vast amphitheatre?  And towards the mortal arena the empires of the
+world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful
+throne where sits Destiny&mdash;the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,
+the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's
+chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon.  And their resolution,
+serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,
+imperator, morituri te salutant!  Hail, Caesar, those about to die
+salute thee!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within
+its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed
+mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,
+deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes&mdash;the
+funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead
+yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,
+laws&mdash;till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence
+sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+§ 6.  BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS<BR>
+OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE OF THE PRESENT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for
+another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have
+striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of
+Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny.  Fixed in her resolve, the
+will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course?  The narrow
+space of the path in front of her that is discernible even
+dimly&mdash;whither does it tend or appear to tend?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a
+principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of
+Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of
+conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict.  The
+scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but
+the pragmatic expression of this mystery.  Here is the metaphysical
+basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in
+human art, in human action.  And thus that law, which, as I pointed
+out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in
+the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in
+interpreting the last transformation of all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the
+domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial
+Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of
+the idea incarnate in Hellas.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as
+the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished
+systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons.  But the
+Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished
+races and through vanished universes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations
+undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the
+foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly
+imagined.  For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no
+altar,[<A NAME="chap07fn10text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn10">10</A>] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater
+than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat.  Throughout her
+bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the
+village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall
+find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,
+and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil
+his being's supreme law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the
+summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the
+paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.
+Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind.  And thus Britain
+shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,
+the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of
+religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is
+compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,
+in social institutions.  Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the
+Ghibelline politician, the author of the <I>De Monarchia</I>, discerned this
+ever more clearly.  Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the
+Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius.  In the
+fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less
+divinely missioned than the Hebrew.  Though contemporary of the
+generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an
+Arab <I>soufi</I>, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of
+light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source
+and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe
+itself, and all the desires of men.  In an age which silenced the
+scholastics he founded Hell in the <I>Ethics</I> of Aristotle, as on a
+traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the
+great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on
+his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab
+poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the
+wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that
+already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner
+music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great
+Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the
+achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious
+cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the
+mind of man?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought
+of Dante's!  No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which
+is based on religion.  Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,
+all break before its presence.  What a light is cast upon the deeper
+places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the
+seventeenth century!  Genius for religion is rare as other forms of
+genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the
+State its rank is primary.  In the soul, religion marks the meridian of
+the divine.  By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of
+all else in life is tested.  And there is nothing which a race will not
+more willingly surrender than its religion.  The race which changes its
+religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and
+ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience
+or neglectful by despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present
+attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent
+humanity.  She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with
+sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others.  And confronting her
+at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of
+Akbar, and more auspicious.  Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and
+worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design.  The forms,
+the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no
+integral part of that religion's life.  Even when by the progress of
+the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which
+time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are
+cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.
+But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of
+its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes&mdash;these are beyond the
+touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man.  Inseparable
+from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life
+changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine
+whence they came.  The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away
+the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized
+around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its
+loveliness.  Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,
+the <I>idea</I> enshrined in the Athênê of Phidias, the immortal cause of
+its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought
+immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But a greater task awaits Britain.  Among the races of the earth whose
+fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent
+upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain
+that harmony which Dante discerned?  What empire, disregarding the
+mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,
+institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by
+inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly
+opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing
+all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,
+institutions, rites, and creeds?  Nature and the dead shall lend their
+unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes!  Thus will Britain turn to
+the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the
+religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed
+from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the
+artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening
+intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing.  Man grows
+conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the
+round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to
+be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the
+Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task
+exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde
+"patriotism"?  For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,
+hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more
+impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.
+This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is
+already by her past committed.  The task is great, for between
+civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity,
+suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying.  From this the Greek division
+of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it
+possesses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the
+subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and
+religions of the world, the short space that is illumined of the path
+in front of Britain does unmistakably lead.  Every year, every month
+that passes, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny
+which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race.  The actions, the
+purposes of other empires and races, seem but to illustrate the
+actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its
+relations to Humanity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall,
+it will at least be as that hero of the <I>Iliad</I> fell, "doing some
+memorable thing."  Were not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to
+incur the taunt, <I>propter vitam vivendi perdere causas</I>, or that cast
+by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," <I>a
+Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui</I>, "hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God"?  The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and
+by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst,
+in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in
+suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in
+triumph or defeat, to eternity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember
+the dead.  Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much
+things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought
+of every hour.  In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest
+counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing
+eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are
+not yet.  Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or
+statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died,
+and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned
+that they laid the foundations of this Empire.  Masters of their own
+fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges
+unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or
+possessors.  But they set higher store on glory than on life, and
+valued great deeds above length of days.  They loved their country,
+dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for
+that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of
+the divine within such life, that they fought and fell.  And this great
+inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief
+inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise,
+and with phantom fingers beckon England on!  From the fields of their
+fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort
+arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour.  And lo!
+gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call,
+clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of
+hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other
+wars&mdash;Brunanburh and Senlac, Creçy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.
+<I>Their</I> battle-cries await our answer&mdash;the chivalry's at Agincourt,
+"Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout,
+which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts!  The Lord of
+Hosts!"&mdash;these await our answer, that response which by this war we at
+last send ringing down the ages, "God for Britain, Justice and Freedom
+to the world!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a
+challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the
+future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our
+race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so
+remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this
+generation.  Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more
+imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this
+nation and to this people.  And, again, if we should hesitate, or if we
+should decide wrongly, it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the
+narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead and the
+despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to
+us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap07fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn1text">1</A>] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta
+idea" and the "inadequat&oelig;] idea"; but the distinction above flows
+from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not
+Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn2text">2</A>] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht;
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Der Herr der Schöpfung hat alles bedacht.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">GOETHE, <I>West-östlicher Divan, Buch der Sprüche</I>.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="chap07fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn3text">3</A>] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic
+Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan
+Arabia.  "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which
+Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the
+eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam
+offers a fair field for speculative politics.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn4text">4</A>] Yet the scientific conception of the <I>destruction</I> or <I>decay</I> of
+this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into
+a mockery.  (See Prof. C. A. Young, <I>Manual of Astronomy</I>, p. 571, and
+Prof. F. R. Moulton, <I>Introduction to Astronomy</I>, p. 486.)
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn5text">5</A>] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest
+works of its class in French literature.  Turgot's was one of those
+minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter
+bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.  The fogs and mists
+of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed
+out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot.  And a fragment written by Turgot
+in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title
+of Condorcet's great <I>Esquisse</I>.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn6"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn6text">6</A>] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary
+principles abound in Goethe's writings.  The violence of the first
+impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a
+climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories
+of the <I>Werther</I> and <I>Goetz</I> period, which his heart remembered when in
+his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a
+large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of
+Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to
+German politics and to the War of Liberation.  Even of 1809, the year
+of Eckmühl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German
+freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful
+returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"
+and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought
+quietude in oriental poetry&mdash;Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="chap07fn8"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn7text">7</A>] Of his <I>Contes</I> Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a
+taillé un camée littéraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi
+rigoureuse perfection de forme."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn8text">8</A>] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived
+through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of
+the other's work.  Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.
+Indeed <I>Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung</I>, though read by a few, was
+practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date
+when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more
+detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to
+Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness.  Schopenhauer, on the
+other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's
+essays on German literature in the <I>Edinburgh</I>, and though ignorant as
+yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of
+English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.
+But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's
+teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the
+opportunity often presents itself.  Wagner, it is known, was a student
+both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle.  Schopenhauer's proud injunction,
+indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare
+himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine
+wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher
+teaching of Wagner, and&mdash;though in a less degree&mdash;of Carlyle.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn9"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn9text">9</A>] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative
+rather than on artistic sympathy.  The Russian indeed never quite
+understood Flaubert's "rage for the word."  Yet the deep inner concord
+of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence.  It was the
+supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet
+was the friendship of his earlier years.  Yet they met seldom, and
+their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as
+described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after
+some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening
+would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht,
+Alfred."  It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the
+dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is
+darkly shadowed.  The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive
+to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of
+travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of
+its unending rest.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn10text">10</A>] Cf. Philostratus, <I>Life of Appollonius</I>.  I. 28.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NOTE.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the <I>Daily
+News</I> Special Number for December 31st, 1900.  In it he presents a
+survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during
+the nineteenth century.  He outlines the development of the New German
+Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and
+Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of
+Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present
+death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe.  The future
+<I>rôles</I> of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the
+author.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody close, and the fury
+of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a
+time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as
+now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the
+determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half
+regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once
+fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then,
+as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question
+whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century,
+pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny
+there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally
+arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that
+the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half
+its course to the Mohammedan.  Yet in one deep enough matter the mood
+of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe
+of 1900.  Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation
+between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise
+moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in
+1800 was radiantly clear to all men&mdash;the glory and the wonder, the
+endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century
+and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity.  The
+desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was
+in sight.  The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, "Bliss was it in
+that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine
+was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,<BR>
+Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,<BR>
+Wandelt, Brüder, eure Bahn,<BR>
+Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of
+victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired
+of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of
+Poland, and the Russian steppes.  Since those days three generations
+have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and passed to their rest,
+and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century
+and the long vista of its years!  Man presents himself no more as he
+was delineated by the poets of 1800.  Not now does man appear to the
+poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like
+some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted
+minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself
+like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink
+of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of
+the worlds.  From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the
+great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe?  Whither are
+vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened?  Is it final
+despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary
+eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit
+of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring,
+wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789,
+of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit
+valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in
+every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and
+personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable.  That word was
+"Freedom"&mdash;freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the
+thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of
+principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the
+negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating;
+freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of
+Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman;
+to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom
+to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic
+injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs
+of the elder centuries!  A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,
+that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and
+sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself
+to the world.  But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived
+in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest
+this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol
+and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream.  Therefore, he spoke
+the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,
+straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or
+boldly uttered&mdash;"France and Bonaparte."  Since the death of Mohammed,
+no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and
+aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.
+Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the
+first year of the century dedicates to him his <I>Génie du
+Christianisme</I>, that work which, after <I>La Nouvelle Héloïse</I>, most
+deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.
+And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name
+"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest
+achievement in art, save the <I>Prometheus</I> of Shelley, that the
+Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired.  In that year, at Weimar,
+Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been
+in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the
+disdain of the greater poet.  Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even
+then the spell of Napoleon's name.  And in that year, the greatest of
+English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,
+with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,
+the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's
+allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in
+Europe and in the world.  To the calmer devotion of genius was added
+the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.
+And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself
+capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men&mdash;an
+energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the
+prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of
+Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an
+imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from
+a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own
+heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all
+around was trouble and disarray&mdash;the calm of a spirit habituated to the
+Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his
+youth upwards.  Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and
+Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly
+gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of
+his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.
+If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the
+victor, it was but for a moment.  In the universal horror and joy with
+which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure
+of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men
+felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up
+inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new
+world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive
+transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched.  In the gradual
+declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the
+warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word
+travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or
+solicitude which marks the closing years of the century.  The first
+disillusionment came swiftly.  Fifteen years pass, years of war and
+convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth
+century, the century of Alaric and Attila&mdash;and within that space, those
+fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the
+aspirations of men!  The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor
+Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race.  France, the
+world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the
+armies of Europe, risen in arms against her!  Emperors and kings,
+nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers
+like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Körner, warriors like Kutusov,
+Blücher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments
+of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities
+and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in
+this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and
+one sole man&mdash;the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon?  What marvel
+that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other
+of modern ages.  Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France
+false to the Revolution.  Man's action at its highest is, like his art,
+symbolic.  To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of
+a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall
+of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty.  To the Europe
+of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the
+princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into
+the side of Italy to keep the wound open"&mdash;these were like the Bastille
+to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,
+injustice and tyranny.  And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,
+the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the
+tyrants the hosts of the free.  What were his own despotisms, his own
+rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouché, the stifled Press, the
+<I>guet-apens</I> of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary
+war followed by another&mdash;what were these things but the discipline, the
+necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and
+felicity of the centuries to come?  Napoleon at the height of Imperial
+power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions
+unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.
+"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred
+years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can
+now be trusted to their own guidance."  The hour of his death, whether
+by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the
+hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart.  That hour of
+penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into
+the silence and the darkness.  Napoleon, trusting to the word and to
+the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed
+star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels.  But at the outset he
+has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits
+of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,
+its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats.  Yet it is
+in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of
+Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful
+resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland.  Then, turning to the
+West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,
+and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,
+and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end
+there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination.  The
+Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed
+suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against
+its liberators!  But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,
+calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of
+Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian
+Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe
+against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most
+ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants
+of Francis II or Frederick William III.  At Vienna the gaily-plumaged
+diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of
+unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the
+most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the
+fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the
+Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the
+lingering anguish of Prometheus.  And if not one man of supreme genius
+then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of
+that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made
+themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what
+two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their
+hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no
+more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;
+that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can
+never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the
+abdication at the Elysée is a conflict between the two principles of
+Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for
+constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and
+the watchword of Humanity.  In theory the divine right of peoples was
+arrayed against the divine right of kings.  The conflict was waged
+bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle.  The dungeon, the
+torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or
+Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered&mdash;these were the
+weapons of the tyrants.  The secret society, the Marianne, the
+Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or
+transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,
+Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland&mdash;these were the sole weapons left to
+Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon.  And in
+this singular conflict, what leaders!  In Spain, the heroic Juan
+Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Görres, the morning-star of
+political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and
+the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause.  It was
+not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the
+possibility of united action.  Opposed to these were the united
+purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim&mdash;the repression
+of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the
+great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller
+principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,
+Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena.  To this war against Liberty the Czar
+Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Krüdener's phrase, had
+struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity
+of a crusade.  From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of
+the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel
+the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous
+despotism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the
+place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.
+"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to
+be the enemy of the Revolution."  Nature, indeed, and the environment
+of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.
+Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a
+heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high
+with any generous impulse.  He was hostile to nobility of thought,
+action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a
+living satire upon himself, his life, his aims.  He despised history,
+for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.
+But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,
+and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a
+thoughtful mind.  Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and
+interminable <I>billets-doux</I> written between sentences of death, exile,
+the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip
+II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding
+the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and
+espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western
+world.  There was nothing in him that was great.  But he was
+indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years.  Nesselrode,
+Hardenberg, Talleyrand even&mdash;whose Memoirs seem the work of genius
+beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's&mdash;found their
+designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy.  Congress
+after Congress&mdash;Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona&mdash;exhibited
+his triumph to Europe.  At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to
+the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the
+Empire, was dictated by Metternich&mdash;"Hold fast by what is old, for that
+alone is good.  If our forefathers found in this the true path, why
+should we seek another?  New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles
+which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.
+Beware of such ideas!  It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of
+loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal
+subjects to me.  See that you fulfil this task!"  Is there in human
+history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom
+or foresight of him who penned it?  It were an insult to the great
+Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian.  Yet they
+succeeded.  The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity
+was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times
+had not yet arisen.  Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire
+lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain?  Has all the blood from
+Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain?  Hard
+on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe
+the message that Napoleon was dead.  "It is not an event," said
+Talleyrand, "but a piece of news."  The remark was just.  Europe seemed
+now one vast Sainte Hélène, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all
+hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished.  The solitary grave at
+Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a
+cause for ever lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance.  Heine's
+letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three
+Days awakened.  "Lafayette, the tricolour, the <I>Marseillaise</I>!" he
+writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"
+reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize
+again the sacred weapons.  Bring flowers!  I will crown my head for the
+fight of death.  Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,
+words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and
+illumine the cabins of the poor."  But when Lafayette presented to
+France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton
+umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
+Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when
+Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the
+struggle&mdash;then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.
+France herself was weary of the illusion.  "We had need of a sword," a
+Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears."  The taunt was as
+foolish as it was unjust.  France assuredly had done her part in the
+war for Liberty.  The hour had come for the States of Europe to work
+out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,
+a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,
+and Metternich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more
+limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of
+the world.  Other despots died&mdash;Alexander I in 1825, the two
+Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and
+Frederick William III in 1840.  Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,
+Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on&mdash;"the gods," as
+Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."
+The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric
+he had reared.  From Guizot and his master he found but little
+resistance.  The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian
+system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little
+resistance as the France of Guizot.  Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion
+of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of
+his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of
+Europe than the march of an army.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is
+endless and unresting.  The moment of collision between an old and a
+new principle of human action is a revolution.  Such a turning-point is
+the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848.  Two
+forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet
+indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed
+to ancient Republicanism&mdash;the principle of Nationality and the
+principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under
+various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces
+of the present age.  The freedom of the nation was the form into which
+the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled.  Saint-Simonianism
+preserved for a time the old tradition.  But the devotees of
+Saint-Simon's greatest work, <I>Le Nouveau Christianisme</I>, after
+anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of
+Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,
+and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,
+but for France, for Germany, or for Italy.  Patriotism was taking the
+place of Humanism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism
+throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the
+astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the
+Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar&mdash;the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the
+Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all
+Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of
+the party of Roumanian unity&mdash;appeared as a glorious continuance, or
+even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792.  Louis Napoleon,
+entering like the cut-purse King in <I>Hamlet</I>, who stole a crown and put
+it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason
+of Gorgei, the <I>coup d'état</I> of December, 1851, shattered these airy
+imaginings.  Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the
+change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the
+<I>Girondins</I> or the poet of <I>Hernani</I>.  For the principle of
+Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the
+second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German
+Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more
+potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century.
+It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave
+the volumes of Palacky's <I>History of Bohemia</I> a power like that of a
+war-song.  Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of
+Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its
+course in Hungary to a glorious close&mdash;the Magyar nation.  Even in
+Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of
+Pan-Slavism, which the war of 1878&mdash;the Schipka Pass, Plevna, the
+dazzling heroism of Skobeleff&mdash;has made memorable.  In the triumph of
+this same principle lies the future hope of Spain.  Spain has been
+exhausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist intrigue, by the
+arrogance of successive dictators, and by the bloody reprisals of
+faction; she has lost the last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso
+XIII fate seems to reserve the task of completing again by mutual
+resignation that union with Portugal of which Castelar indicated the
+basis&mdash;a common blood and language, the common graves which are their
+ancient battle-fields, and the common wars against the Moslem, which
+are their glory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great
+principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of
+the European stage.  This is the principle whose votaries confronted
+Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.
+The famous sentence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its
+touch of sentimentality marking the distinction between September,
+1792, and February, 1848, "The tricolour has made the tour of the
+world; the red flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been turned
+into derision by subsequent events.  The red flag has made the tour of
+the world as effectively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte.
+The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism&mdash;for all four,
+however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue,
+spring from a common root&mdash;have been variously ascribed in France to
+the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels,
+Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which
+arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the
+broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.
+But the principle which informs alike the writings of individual
+thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar force in the first
+half of the century from the doctrines and teachings of Fichte and
+Schleiermacher, is but the principle to which in all ages suffering and
+wrong have made their vain appeal&mdash;the responsibility of all for the
+misery of the many and the enduring tyranny of the few.  Indignant at
+the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia applies his destructive
+criticism to all institutions, civil, religious, political, and finding
+all hollow, seeks to overwhelm all in one common ruin.  The
+Emancipation of 1861 was to the Nihilist but the act of Tyranny veiling
+itself as Justice.  It left the serf, brutalized by centuries of
+oppression, even more completely than before to the mercy of the boyard
+and the exploiters of human souls.  Michel Bakounine, Kropotkine,
+Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the
+signal to the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisations of
+Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and for a time, indeed,
+Bazaroffism was in literary jargon the equivalent of Nihilism.  If at
+intervals in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at some new
+crime, attempted or successful, of Anarchy, if Europe notes the
+singular regularity with which the crime is traced to Italy, and is
+perplexed at the absence of all the usual characteristics of conspiracy
+against society&mdash;for what known motives of human action, vanity or
+fear, hope or the gratification of revenge, can explain the silence of
+the confederates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the agents of
+his will?&mdash;if Europe is perplexed at this apparition of a terror
+unknown to the ancient world, the Italian sees in it but the operation
+of the law of responsibility.  To the nameless sufferings of Italy he
+ascribes the temper which leads to the mania of the anarchist; and the
+sufferings of Italy in their morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal
+of Italy by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and supremely in
+1856.  As Europe has grown more conscious of its essential unity as one
+State system, diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as the
+Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic appeal to the equality
+of kings, to the derisive theory of the Concert of Europe.  But
+Communism and Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of Europe
+more convincing and more terrible, and full of sinister presage to the
+future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Socialism.  Karl Marx may be
+regarded as the chief exponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or
+international Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual founder of the
+national or Democratic Socialism of Germany.  Marx, whose countenance
+with its curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velasquez,
+Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out as the apostle and avenger
+of human degradation and human suffering, published the first sketch of
+his principles in 1847, but more completely in the manifesto adopted by
+the Paris Commune in 1849.  As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced
+to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in
+wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau <I>père</I>, so the
+new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has
+its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new
+aristocracy, the <I>bourgeoisie</I>.  Factory owners and millionaires have
+taken the place of the <I>noblesse</I> of last century.  And the sufferings
+of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with
+their numbers.  Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires.
+Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own
+wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by
+which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of
+their own despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Marx's greatest work, <I>Das Kapital</I>, published in 1867, was to the new
+revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the <I>Contrat Social</I>
+of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89.  The brilliant genius of
+Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and
+ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature
+of Marx was repelled by these principles.  It was this trait in his
+writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul and his faith in the
+Prussian peasant and the Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time
+the interest of Bismarck.  Even a State such as Austria Lassalle
+regarded as higher than any federal union whatever.  The image of
+Lassalle's character, his philosophy, and too swift career, may be
+found in his earliest work, <I>Heracleitus</I>, the god-gifted statesman
+whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, but realizing his life in
+that of others, toiling ceaselessly for the oppressed, the dumb,
+helpless, leaderless masses who suffer silently, yet know not why they
+suffer.  A monarchy resting upon the support of the artisan-myriads
+against the arrogance of the <I>bourgeois</I>, as the Tudor monarchy rested
+upon the support of the yeomen and the towns against the arrogance of
+the feudal barons&mdash;this, in the most effective period of his career,
+was Lassalle's ideal State.  And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply
+to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly been
+characterized as the charter of the whole movement of democratic
+socialism in Germany down to the present hour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European Liberalism a more
+formidable adversary than Metternich.  The youth of Nicholas I had been
+formed by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the Czar
+Alexander.  The Princess Lieven and his mother, Maria Federovna, the
+friend of Stein, and the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in him
+a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and unwearied.  A resolute will,
+dauntless courage, a love of the beautiful in nature and in art, a
+high-souled enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the
+fate-appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies.  The Teuton in
+his blood effaced the Slav, and the fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of
+one sole purpose gives his career something of the tragic unity of
+Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of the Russian
+autocrat.  One God, one law, one Church, one State, Russian in
+language, Russian in creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of
+its civic, military, and municipal life&mdash;this was the dream to the
+realization of which the thirty crowded years of his reign were
+consecrated.  There is grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the
+manner in which he encounters and quells the insurrection of the 26th
+December.  Then, true to the immemorial example of tyrants, he found
+employment for sedition in war.  He tore from Persia in a single
+campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 20,000,000 roubles.
+The mystic Liberalism of Alexander was abandoned.  The free
+constitution of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old Russian
+party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as distinct from a German, policy
+was welcomed with surprise and tumultuous delight.  "Despotism," he
+declared, "is the principle of my government; my people desires no
+other."  Yet he endeavoured to win young Russia by flattery, as he had
+conquered old Russia by reaction.  He encouraged the movement in poetry
+against the tasteless imitation of Western models, and in society
+against the dominance of the French language.  In the first years of
+his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary expression, and
+Russian prose and Russian verse acquire their own cadences.  Yet
+liberty is the life-blood of art; and liberty he could not grant.  The
+freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of speech forbidden, and
+a strict censorship, exercised by the dullest of officials, stifled
+literature.  "How unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked when
+Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of his dungeon, "all his
+prisoners die on his hands."  How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas!
+All his men of genius died by violent deaths.  Lermontoff and Poushkine
+fell in duels before antagonists who represented the <I>tchinovnik</I>
+class.  Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiédov was assassinated at
+Teheran.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great&mdash;the
+restoration of the Byzantine Empire.  Making admirable use of the
+Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at
+Navarino.  Thus popular at home and abroad, regarded by the Liberals of
+Europe as the restorer of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a
+stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to crush the Poles.
+Enthusiastic Berlin students carried the effigies of Polish leaders in
+triumph; but not a sword was drawn.  England, France, Austria looked on
+silent at the work of Diebitch and Paskievitch, "my two mastiffs," as
+the Czar styled them, and the true "<I>finis Poloniae</I>" had come.  A
+Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the
+extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot.  Yet his
+European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his
+crowning chance&mdash;the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes
+represented Liberty and the Revolution.  Every force that personal
+rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that
+reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the
+efforts of the monarch in this enterprise.  The disaster was sudden,
+overwhelming, irremediable.  Yet in one thing his life was a success,
+and that a great one&mdash;he had Russianised Russia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only
+less significant than the Revolution of 1848.  The isolating force of
+religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East
+upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy.  The hopes of the
+Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria,
+deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the
+Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed
+Hungary.  From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour
+seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his
+name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time.
+The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the
+designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were
+checked.  Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz
+and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor
+Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy.  Thirty years have passed since
+the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices
+which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a
+conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens
+which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and
+after Rossbach.  But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa;
+instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who
+make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious
+peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the
+past.  This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in
+disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but
+there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength
+made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and
+example of a single man&mdash;Giuseppe Mazzini.  To modern Republicanism,
+not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a
+watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world.  Equal rights
+mean equal duties.  The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man.  He
+taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not
+in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of
+those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the
+path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by
+side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by
+establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation
+against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520.
+The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in
+efforts to invent a constitution like that of England.  It was the
+happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of
+1688 and the pupils of Siéyès.  Heine's bitter address to Germany,
+"Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which
+every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Würtemberger, or Rheinlander
+felt not less deeply.  The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but
+it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper
+perception of the aspiration of all Germany.  Which of the multifarious
+kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or
+imperial?  Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her
+tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been
+the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn.  The Danubian
+principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the
+future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost.  Prussia
+alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Blücher,
+of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was
+essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope
+of religious tolerance.  After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue
+north of the Alps was inevitable.  The question was how and in what
+shape the end would realize itself.  Montesquieu insists that, even
+without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment
+of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate.  Yet, with data
+before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire
+without Bismarck.  His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through
+the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary
+period.  His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose
+of Frederick William IV.  His diplomacy led to Königgrätz, and the
+manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a
+call to battle.  And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian
+legions in the field.  From his first definite entry into a State
+career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and
+simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour
+of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian.  From the Hohenzollern he looked
+for no gratitude.  His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the
+individual.  He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the
+value of the word of a King.  False or true to all men else, he was
+unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to
+himself, true to God.  He could not bequeath his secret to those who
+came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to
+Luini.  But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance.  It
+possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a
+common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph.
+Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to
+Bavaria.  Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War,
+Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing
+ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan.  The new Empire, whether it be to Europe
+a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against
+Ultramontanism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian
+alliance.  Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann.
+Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the
+alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century
+began?  It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled
+Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power
+can avert.  Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long,
+terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole
+Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder.  No man's home is a
+home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the
+'<I>Drang nach Osten</I>' turned back for ever."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or
+accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion.  The nineteenth
+century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the
+overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been
+characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry.
+Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the
+imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his
+intelligence, has had in this age its adherents.  The Papacy in each
+successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude.
+Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to
+escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence
+and the perfection of Nature.  Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like
+musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the
+world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch
+to his doom.  Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and
+the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by
+the bull, "<I>Ineffabilis Deus</I>," the Council of the Vatican, the
+thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French
+<I>littérateurs</I>.  The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this
+movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the
+Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and
+Chateaubriand.  Yet in <I>Faust</I> Goethe attempted a reconciliation of
+Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme
+literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.
+Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the
+war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its
+forms.  Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded
+beyond imagination's wing.  Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the
+infinite solitudes of space.  The theory of evolution stirred the
+common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till
+then to the studious calm of the few.  The ardour to know all, to be
+all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century
+had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty
+of man, and surprise has followed surprise.  The aspirations of the
+Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its
+sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle
+Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased
+facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living
+impulse.  As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,
+and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower
+of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one.  The bounds
+of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and
+surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the
+Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the
+soul.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the
+nineteenth century from preceding  centuries&mdash;the  gradually
+increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action&mdash;has
+strengthened this impression.  An age mystic in its religion, symbolic
+in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an
+age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.
+Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of
+thrones, turned to the East and found peace.  What were the armies of
+Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Háfiz and Sádi, and to the
+calm of the trackless centuries far behind?  The mood of Goethe has
+become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of
+the century's end.  The <I>bizarre</I> genius of Nietzsche, whose whole
+position is implicit in Goethe's <I>Divan</I>, popularized it in Germany.
+The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as
+vividly as the oldest, Italy and France.  It controls the meditative
+depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's
+dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert.  It informs the teaching of
+Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky.  Goethe, at the beginning
+of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of
+Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in <I>Tristan</I> and in <I>Parsifal</I>, has
+woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the
+Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the <I>Upanishads</I> into a
+rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of
+Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the
+Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of
+painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze!  The ideal of
+Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins
+Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some
+profounder mystery, some mightier destiny.  More than any race known to
+history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other
+thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his
+own spirit.  The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of
+Wagner attest this.  Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,
+of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.
+Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably.  But the purple
+fringe of another dawn is on the horizon.  Teutonic heroism and
+resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the
+ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty
+calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of
+men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends.  What vistas
+arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this
+union!  The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an
+accomplished hope clearly defined.  The last sun of the dying century
+goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an
+ideal it but darkly discerns.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H6 ALIGN="center">
+GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.
+</H6>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+TREITSCHKE &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         BERNHARDI<BR>
+EXPOUNDED &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;          EXPLAINED<BR>
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+GERMANY AND ENGLAND
+</H1>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+By Professor Cramb.
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction<BR>
+by the Hon. Joseph Choate.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the
+present crisis will read this book.  There are in it things which will
+cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to
+the war so clearly set forth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its
+clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its
+broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the
+occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The <I>Times</I> says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with
+all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly
+grateful."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The <I>Spectator</I> says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for
+themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the
+German Imperialism.  They will learn in the smallest possible space
+what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+Three Important Works
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE GERMAN WAR BOOK
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of
+the German Army.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H.  MORGAN, M.A.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late
+Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct
+and its Legal Results."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General
+Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the
+conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies,
+neutrals, hostages.  Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+FRANCE IN DANGER
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+By PAUL VERGNET.  Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Crown 8vo.  2s. 6d. net.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what
+Professor Cramb did for England.  After a careful study of the
+Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his
+countrymen that War was imminent.  His aspect of the question has never
+been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought
+to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great
+War.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency
+legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the
+Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War
+on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on
+Commercial Relations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Crown 8vo.</I>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES
+</H4>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+By E. B. MITCHELL.
+</H5>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+<I>With Map.  Crown 8vo.</I>
+</H5>
+
+<P>
+This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of
+things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14,
+at the end of the great rush.  The writer, who is neither a summer
+visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant,
+had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city
+and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is
+neither all gloom nor all brightness.  At the present time, when the
+War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a
+disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and
+timely.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain, by
+J. A. Cramb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
+       Nineteenth Century Europe
+
+Author: J. A. Cramb
+
+Release Date: December 19, 2009 [EBook #30710]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIGINS, DESTINY--IMPERIAL BRITAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: transliterated Greek is surrounded by plus signs,
+e.g. "+agoniai+".  Italicized text is surrounded by _underscores_.  In
+the phrase "_sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_", "[)a]" represents a-breve, "[=e]"
+represents e-macron.  "[oe]" represents the oe-ligature pair.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: J. A. Cramb]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ORIGINS AND DESTINY
+
+
+OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+
+
+BY THE LATE
+
+J. A. CRAMB, M.A.
+
+PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON
+
+
+
+
+WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+LONDON:
+
+JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+
+1915
+
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I determine and
+deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and force enough to draw
+the mindes both of young and olde to the diligent reading and digesting
+of these labours.  For what man is there so despising knowledge, or any
+so idle and slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what
+policies or by what kinde of government the most part of nations in the
+universall world were vanquished, subdued and made subject unto the one
+empire of the Romanes, which before that time was never seen or heard?
+Or who is there that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or
+studie, that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value or
+worthy to be esteemed before this?"
+
+_The Histories of the most famous Chronographer_, POLYBIUS.
+
+(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568).
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in
+May, June, and July, 1900.  Their immediate inspiration was the war in
+South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in
+these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the
+ideals and deeds of the present hour.  When the book first appeared,
+Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections
+by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might
+not be without service to his country."  In the same hope his lectures
+are now reprinted.
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May,
+1862.  On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he
+graduated in 1885, taking 1st Class Honours in Classics.  In the same
+year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature.  He
+also studied at Bonn University.  He subsequently travelled on the
+Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.
+Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son.  From 1888 to
+1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College,
+Glasgow.  Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to
+the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and also occasional reviews to
+periodicals.  For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service
+Commission.  In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of
+Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his
+death.  He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the
+Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres.  In
+London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.
+His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913,
+the subject being the relations between England and Germany.  In
+response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures
+for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+SECTION
+
+   WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+
+1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+
+2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+
+3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+
+1. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+
+2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+   THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+
+1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+
+2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+
+4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+
+5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+   THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+1. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+
+3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+
+4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+
+5. MILITARISM
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+   WHAT IS WAR?
+
+1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+
+2. DEFINITION OF WAR
+
+3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+
+4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+
+5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+
+6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+
+7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+   THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+
+1. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+
+2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+
+3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+
+4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+
+5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+   THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY
+
+4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+
+5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+
+6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE
+   MANDATE OF THE PRESENT
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+1. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+
+2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+
+3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
+
+
+
+
+  REFLECTIONS ON THE
+  ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF
+  IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]
+
+The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
+impress on the traditions of humanity.  In no period has the burden of
+the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
+its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
+so monotonously.
+
+How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
+Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
+stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
+of a county, proceed to write the History of the World!  And in
+speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive
+incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
+he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
+possesses.  But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
+age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
+mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.
+
+This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
+which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
+mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
+endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
+results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
+caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
+the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
+all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
+things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
+with it silence and utter death.  The deepened significance of history
+springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
+our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
+present.  The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
+mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
+become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
+Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
+that invests them with this magic.  Life has become more
+self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
+the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
+
+World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
+with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
+Timeless manifesting itself in Time.  And the distinguishing function
+of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
+bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
+discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
+and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
+whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
+
+Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
+French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
+only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
+subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
+these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
+of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
+similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
+Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
+to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
+amongst the world-empires of the past.  I use the phrase "Imperial
+Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
+associations are inseparable.  It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
+the like.  But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
+spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
+has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
+material frame of empire.  With the rise of this spirit, this
+consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
+people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared.  The unity of
+Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
+achievement.  The aspirations of the period of the
+_Aufklaerung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this
+edifice their political realization.  But the incident is not
+unprecedented.  Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
+obsolete.  It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
+under Louis XIV affected it.  But in this unobserved, this silent
+growth of Imperial Britain--so unobserved that it presents itself even
+now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the
+State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
+upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
+has few, if any, parallels in history.
+
+
+
+Sec. I.  THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
+
+What is the nature of this Consciousness?  What is its historical
+basis?  Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
+
+In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
+individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
+purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious.  Life's end is then
+manifest.  The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
+becomes the fixed law of existence.  Such moments inevitably are
+difficult to localize.  Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
+Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind."  But it is
+neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
+two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
+Napoleon to himself.  So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
+genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
+to France.  Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
+beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
+to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
+Thrasymene and Cannae.  It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
+the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
+The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
+line.  Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
+world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
+traces.  But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
+necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
+Unconscious to the Conscious.  Similarly in the England of the
+seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
+master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation.  This is
+the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
+the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
+"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
+lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers.  It is the unifying
+motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century.  The
+eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing.  An ideal
+from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
+eighteenth century.  But from the closing years of the century to the
+present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
+with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
+origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
+impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
+Britain.
+
+It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
+beginnings of great movements in history.  Nevertheless it is often
+convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
+or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
+itself.  And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
+constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
+I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
+patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
+hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
+further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
+speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
+select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
+Warren Hastings.  There this first awakening consciousness of an
+Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
+indeed.  Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
+of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow.  His conception of history
+at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
+school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus.  In religion he revered the
+traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time.  His
+literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
+Charles James Fox.  In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
+the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
+indifferent.  As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
+century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
+seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
+that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs.  But if
+his range was narrow, he is master there.  "Within that circle none
+durst walk but he."  No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
+rhetoric, a mightier language.  And if he is a reactionary in
+constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
+prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
+nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
+on violence, but on justice and freedom.  This ideal influences the
+action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
+its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
+from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke.  And in the
+seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
+hardly be traced at all.  In the speculative politics of that century
+we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
+part.  I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
+of Cromwell as "a great Briton."  Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
+neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
+in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
+sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
+Imperial Britain.  His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
+of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
+not consciously, not deliberately.
+
+In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
+influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
+than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
+us.  The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
+definitely, there lost in receding vistas.  On the battlefield or in
+the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
+is slowly elaborating itself.  And within the nation at large the ideal
+which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
+clearer consciousness.  Its influence throws a light upon the last
+speeches of the younger Pitt.  If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
+d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
+ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
+Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
+pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2]  The ideal makes
+great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
+Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent.  "The Cry of
+the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
+after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
+the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
+Nile.  The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
+strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
+battle-cry of the "Rights of Man."  Thus has this ideal, grown
+conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life.  It
+removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
+they by being free may bring freedom to others.  In the great
+renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
+name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus.  It imparts to modern
+politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
+at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
+
+Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
+constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
+in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
+the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
+possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
+at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
+his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
+
+Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
+to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal
+which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
+surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
+Scotland, and of Ireland?  Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
+transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
+is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
+Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
+of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte.  This is the ideal, and in the
+resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
+its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
+as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
+of Imperial Britain.
+
+As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
+his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
+with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
+sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task.  This is
+the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
+races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
+Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome.  To spread
+the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
+Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon.  Similarly of
+Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
+in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan.  And in
+this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
+necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
+lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
+The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
+examine in a later lecture.
+
+Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
+in a clearer light.  Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
+British.  It is not Roman, not Hellenic.  The Roman ideal moulds every
+form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
+East, down to the eighteenth century.  The theory of the mediaeval
+empire derives immediately from Rome.  The Roman justice disguised as
+righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial.  The
+Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
+that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
+_Paradiso_.[3]  Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
+scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
+_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian.  The voluntary or
+accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
+which it popularized is worth considering.  It is false to the genius
+of Rome.  It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
+historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
+nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words.  _Imperium ac
+justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
+conceptions of Empire and Freedom.  The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
+Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
+Rome's name, deifying her genius.  But the ideal of Freedom, the
+freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
+highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
+statesman!  Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
+at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
+Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
+conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
+life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
+the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
+throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find.  The common
+traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
+of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
+arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
+unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
+of the ancient State.  And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
+effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
+the most original and varied forms.  The power of the Roman ideal, on
+the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
+seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
+itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France.  Consider how completely the
+ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
+closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
+Rome!
+
+The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
+is tedious as a twice-told tale.  Her art, her palaces, are her own
+eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
+waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
+multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
+sky.  But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
+inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
+grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
+
+Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
+proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
+because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
+that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
+life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
+But disaster taught Spain nothing--
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+  Alas, for mortal history!  In happy fortune
+  A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
+  A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
+  And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.
+
+
+The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
+comment than the decline of Spain.[4]
+
+The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
+of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
+bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
+Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
+before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
+
+And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
+procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
+Revolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
+
+From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
+first amongst modern empires, completely breaks.  For it is a new
+empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
+moulded by a new ideal.
+
+Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
+what each brings to the vanquished.
+
+Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
+army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
+That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
+legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
+behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
+Burgundy and Lorraine.  One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
+who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
+glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
+fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
+irresistible strength.  And to the Netherlands what does that army
+bring?  Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
+break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
+dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
+_auto-da-fe_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
+of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals.  These
+things accompany the march of Alva.  And that army of ours which day by
+day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
+does that army portend?  That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
+dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fe_; it brings with it, and not to one
+people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
+the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
+ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
+generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
+generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
+prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_elargissez Dieu!_"--to
+liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
+itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
+with the Divine.  And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
+coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
+consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
+designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
+pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
+whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
+some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
+issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
+and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
+conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
+this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
+the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
+for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
+humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
+distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
+has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
+
+In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
+the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
+The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
+experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
+to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
+the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
+Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
+root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race.  The former
+nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
+end.  It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
+not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
+natural presence.  Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
+condition of man's being.  In the ancient world, government ever tends
+to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
+that State is imperial.  In the modern, government with concrete
+justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
+of the State whose ideal is higher.
+
+The vision of the _De Monarchia_--one God, one law, one creed, one
+emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in
+justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose
+imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur--does but
+describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon
+men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of
+Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of
+the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever
+eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual
+and melancholic.  Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into
+the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression
+in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"--"The State?  I am the State."  The
+ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme
+representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but
+from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the
+Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar."  That word
+thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God.
+It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the
+whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual.  Yet
+Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as
+strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries
+after that command was uttered.
+
+Such then is the character of the ideal.  And in the resolution as a
+people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer
+all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of
+Imperial Britain.  None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen
+within the consciousness of a people.  And to England through all her
+territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now.  If ever
+there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the
+twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of
+its fate, it is NOW!  There is an Arab fable of the white steed of
+Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to
+every man, as to every people, comes _once_.  Glory to that man, to
+that race, who dares to mount it!  And that steed, is it not nearing
+England now?  Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on
+the blast!
+
+Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great
+resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented
+themselves to men and to nations.  Even now they present themselves,
+manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to
+humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion
+of other States.  But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it
+alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every
+imperial race that History knows.  How shall any empire, any state,
+conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the
+individual--"In honour preferring one another"?  This in an imperial
+State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
+
+But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to
+swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered.  That
+pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony
+of Magersfontein.  For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month
+that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial
+Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South
+Africa.  If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all
+the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
+carry with it its own refutation.  There is a kind of tragic elevation
+in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
+Timour.  But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
+Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
+the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
+design thus base, ambition thus sordid?  And if we call to memory the
+dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
+us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
+traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
+dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus?  And in what cause have we died?"
+were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
+world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
+is for the mines, it is for the mines!"  No man can believe that; no
+man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night!  The
+imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck.  Great enterprises have
+ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
+seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities.  But to
+arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
+baser alloy?  To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
+long approved?  Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.
+
+Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
+ideal--an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
+their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
+path of England now.  For this these men have died, from the first
+battle of the war to that fought yesterday.  And it is this knowledge,
+this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
+compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
+They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
+past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future.  They
+have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
+impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
+account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises!  But yesterday
+in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
+seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down
+upon the place of their rest.  For this ideal they have died--"in their
+youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
+spring from the year."
+
+Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
+greet the great dead who fell in the old wars!  See, through the mists
+of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
+from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
+greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
+from their wounds!  Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
+disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
+at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
+have sent thither as the _avant-garde_ of our faith, that in this cause
+is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.
+
+
+
+[1] The Latin work of Osorius, _De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
+Lusitaniae_, appeared in 1574, two years later than _Os Lusiadas_.  The
+twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
+1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens.  But the
+hero of Osorius is Alboquerque.  His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
+literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
+of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
+with his eyes upon his subject.  Seven years after the Latin, a French
+translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
+published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
+others, bringing the history down to 1529.
+
+[2] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
+April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
+Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
+afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
+Tuesday morning (April 3rd).  The close of the speech is thus reported:
+"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
+the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
+reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
+regret.  We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
+calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
+commerce.  We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
+in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
+blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure
+religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of
+that immense continent.  Then may we hope that even Africa, though last
+of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening
+of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon
+us in a much earlier period of the world.  Then also will Europe,
+participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample
+recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no
+longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the
+darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more
+speedily dispelled--
+
+  Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis,
+  illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.
+
+Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used
+with a different view--
+
+  His demum exactis--
+  devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
+  fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas;
+  largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit
+  purpureo."
+
+Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment
+remains, was delivered on April 27th (_Parl. Hist._ xxix, pp. 1134-88).
+
+[3] Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history
+of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the
+centuries which follow.  To Dante he represents at once the subtleties
+of Jurisprudence and Theology.  The Eagle's hymn in the _Paradiso_
+(Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and
+Mediaeval Imperialism.  The essence of the entire treatise _De
+Monarchia_ is in these cantos; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person
+speaks, is informed by the same spirit.
+
+[4] Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a
+further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of
+Spain.  Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single
+life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an
+empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in
+fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject
+State.  Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel,
+John III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe.
+But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry
+went hand in hand.  To the pride of her conquistadores was added the
+fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within
+the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
+administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
+incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa.  The
+resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
+the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
+certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
+themselves upon the mind.  And these distinctions mark the divergence
+between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
+designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
+Britain.  Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
+Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
+Dante.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 15_th_, 1900]
+
+Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
+move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
+the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
+Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
+The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
+transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
+To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
+has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
+hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
+preliminary study.  Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
+but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
+instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
+generations.  But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
+a contemporary of the remotest ages.  The beam of light, however far
+into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
+sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
+whence he came.  As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
+Divine grows more, not less insistent.  Each moment indeed is rooted in
+the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
+comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
+memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
+itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
+Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
+sovereignty, as the eye is unmoved at the narrow bounds that hedge its
+vision, and finds peace where he would otherwise have found but despair.
+
+Those affinities, those intimate relations of the past and present, are
+the basis of speculative politics.  A judgment upon a movement in the
+present, an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, a nation, or
+an empire will describe in the future, is of little value unless from a
+wide enough survey the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its
+support.
+
+Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated above we have the ideal
+of a race destined to Empire, and at last across the centuries grown
+conscious of that destiny, the question confronts us--is it possible
+out of the past, not surveying it from the vantage-ground of the
+present merely, but as it were living into the present from the past,
+to foreshadow the rise of this consciousness?  Or turning back in the
+light of this consciousness to the past, is there offered by the past a
+justification of this interpretation of the present, of this movement
+styled "Imperialism"?
+
+The heart of the matter lies in the transformation of mediaeval
+patriotism into modern imperialism, in the evolution or development
+which out of the Englishman of the earlier centuries has produced the
+Englishman of the present, moved by other and higher political ends.
+Is there any incident or series of incidents in our history, of
+magnitude enough profoundly to affect the national consciousness, to
+which we may look for the causes, or for the formative spirit, of this
+change?  And in their effect upon the national consciousness of Britain
+have these incidents followed any law traceable in other nations or
+empires?
+
+
+
+Sec. I.  OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
+
+There is a kind of criticism directed against politics which, year by
+year or month by month, makes the discovery that between the code which
+regulates the action of States and the code which regulates the actions
+of individuals divergencies or contradictions are constantly arising.
+War violates the ordinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of
+truth; expediency, those of justice.  And the conclusion is drawn that
+whatever be the softening influences of civilization upon the relations
+of private life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, brutally
+aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns undisturbed.  Era succeeds
+era, faiths rise and set, statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs,
+act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
+their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
+the centuries.  And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
+"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
+Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
+self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.
+
+Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
+each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
+whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
+individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
+actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
+the actions of individuals.  And he therefore is the greatest statesman
+who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
+to the individual--whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
+adventure!  The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
+the self-communings of Mazzini.
+
+Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
+acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
+applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
+the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals.  The unity
+of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
+distinct from the unity of those parts.  Even in chemistry the laws
+which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
+constituent atoms.  And in that highest and most complex of all
+unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
+another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
+more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
+unities which compose it.  In the region in which States act and
+interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
+Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
+at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals.  The orbit
+described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
+the orbit of the separate life.  The life which the individual
+surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
+return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
+conditions.
+
+These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
+between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
+but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
+suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
+by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
+of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
+something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our
+knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
+other.
+
+The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
+been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
+distinction, between the two codes.  Every principle of Machiavelli is
+implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
+supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
+reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
+or an Oxenstiern.[1]  The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is
+irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or
+the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
+a disaster without a parallel.  What Sulla felt as a first, most living
+impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment.  It is
+thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
+_jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously
+interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and
+the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
+profoundest of modern thinkers.  M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
+in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
+_Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
+the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as
+if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
+inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
+of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
+history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.
+
+To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
+enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
+spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
+History, are not identical with the laws of individual life.  The
+region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is
+possible to obtain some perception, or _Ahnung_ as a German would say,
+of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly
+upon the problem before us.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history
+of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the
+present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence,
+not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic
+Tragedy.  The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the
+soul by Compassion and by Terror--+di eleou kai phobou katharsis+.[3]
+Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the
+definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present
+inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted
+above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of
+fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante--
+
+  Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,
+  Che la vostra miseria non mi tange
+  Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[4]
+
+
+In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision,
+discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues
+unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself.
+Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind,
+and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness
+of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their
+very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the
+loftiest that can engage the human intellect.
+
+Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a
+heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an
+Agamemnon or a Theseus.  Hence, though traceable in all, the operation
+of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the
+history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing
+dimensions.  Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more
+impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens--most poignantly
+perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of
+Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage,
+the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there
+came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced,
+started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread
+certainty of ruin.  That hour was but the essential agony of a
+soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
+of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
+Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.  In the
+writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
+pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
+Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured
+cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some
+higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
+power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
+Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal.  The serious admiration of
+Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
+appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
+not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
+Kleon or of Kritias.  History never again beheld such a band of
+pamphleteers![6]
+
+In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
+similar moment occurs.  After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
+but rises a new city.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
+than the Rome of the Decemvirs.  It is not the inevitable change which
+centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
+Rome's life as a State.  The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
+Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.
+
+So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
+eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
+to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
+imaginative justice of its sway.
+
+In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
+life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
+agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
+consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
+life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century.  After the
+short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
+humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity.  The empire
+purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
+chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
+turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
+The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign
+defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury,
+with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest
+of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the
+desperate lists at Bosworth.
+
+This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political
+historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret
+sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered
+by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned
+out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day.
+
+In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming
+power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a
+very complete manner.  It reveals itself, for instance, in two
+different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be
+dealt with separately.  In the first of these aspects, deeply and
+permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen
+is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy
+appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic
+transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene
+and dauntless courage.  This influence now makes itself felt in English
+politics, in English religion, in English civic life.
+
+If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at
+first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for
+empire.  Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not
+in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any
+sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks
+the imperial character of Persia and of Rome.  England seems fated to
+add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant
+States, illustrating the theme--+hubris phyteuei tyrannon+--"insolence
+begets the tyrant!"  Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns
+from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the
+earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from
+the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith.  And now in the
+days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to
+nothing.  Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow;
+but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais
+will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph.  It was not merely
+the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
+instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
+empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.
+
+But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
+change is now apparent.  As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
+Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
+from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
+arises a new nation.  This declares itself in the altered course of her
+policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland.  In Ireland, for
+instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
+bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
+the Pale.  Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king.  In
+politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I.  He
+abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
+he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
+reverting to the Plantagenet policy.  He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
+but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
+not defeated at all.  King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
+around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
+"companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning.  But
+the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
+recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
+these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
+and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
+deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
+The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
+nationality, cement the union.
+
+In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
+causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
+sink from sight altogether.  As in geology the century is useless as a
+unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
+astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
+spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
+conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
+generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
+The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
+future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
+Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
+that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
+a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
+Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
+the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
+could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
+rather than weakened the energy of her resolve.  Had England fallen in
+the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
+than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
+claim to original or creative Imperialism.  But if she were to perish
+now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
+the recorded annals of man.
+
+Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
+from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania.  And in Islam four
+generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
+displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
+
+In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
+its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
+generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
+unquestionable.  The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
+century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
+bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
+the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
+Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France.  The national
+consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
+its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
+influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
+affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
+England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
+memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
+and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
+strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
+sounds.  Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
+East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
+How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
+race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its
+own life by the contact with this manifold environment?  He who might
+have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
+presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
+influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
+sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
+ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
+the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
+range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
+
+The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
+history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
+moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
+exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
+serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
+law of its being.  There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
+the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
+the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
+Thermopylae, the +energeia tes psyches+--the energy of the soul.  This
+energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertu_ of Machiavelli, the
+spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
+It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
+nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
+insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition.  It is the heroism which
+adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
+daring.
+
+In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
+centuries that immediately succeed Cannae.  Nothing in history is more
+worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
+history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
+Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
+
+Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
+place with the greatest political historians for all time.  It was his
+work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
+the supreme guide in political history.  Polybius has every inducement
+to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
+His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
+Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
+Kosciusko of the old world.  Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
+representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
+study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
+their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
+intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
+there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
+Hellas merely, but of the whole earth.  The message of his history,
+composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
+is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
+wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
+domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
+eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message.  The
+Romano-Hellenic empire is born.  Other men arise both to the east and
+to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
+fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
+Polybius was the first to express immortally.  It inspires the rhetoric
+of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--
+
+  Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
+  credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
+  orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
+  describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
+  tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
+  hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
+  parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
+
+
+The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
+"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
+incredible.  It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
+Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
+Claudian.  And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
+Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields
+such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
+Hapsburg and Bourbon.  Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
+uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
+itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
+flicker in the eighteenth century.
+
+Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
+does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
+itself?  Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
+contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's
+title-deeds of empire.
+
+Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
+myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
+wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
+England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
+humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
+Scotland, greater than before her defeat.  This energy of the soul,
+quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
+struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
+England.
+
+The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
+fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
+lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners.  But it has been transformed,
+and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
+enterprise.  These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
+the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
+kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
+false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
+of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
+way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.
+
+As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
+nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
+this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
+memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
+Marlowe and his elder contemporaries.  Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems
+to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_,
+that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
+some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
+emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible.  In Martin Frobisher,
+for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
+us the England of the first years of Elizabeth!  Frobisher in early
+manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
+blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
+Genovese Columbus to discover America!"  That task was clearly
+England's!  "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
+sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
+northwest passage to Cathay.  Upon this he spends the pith of his
+manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
+sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
+"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
+forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
+suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
+Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable.  In the northern
+latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_
+gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
+Christ His Sonne."
+
+The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy
+of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
+times.  And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
+energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
+the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
+laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
+Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.
+
+In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
+only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
+ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
+justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
+times.  If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
+implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
+systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs.  Eliot, for instance, in the
+work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its
+thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
+ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal.  We
+encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
+Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
+language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
+In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
+the steadfastness of the action.  And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
+from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
+Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
+imperfectly developed.  The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
+upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
+equally sublime, and more catholic and humane.  Whatever its immediate
+influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts
+it was all-powerful.  The very vividness with which they conceive the
+ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high
+purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of
+Selden, and of Falkland.  The perfect State, the scope of its laws,
+government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads
+thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at
+other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of
+adverse interests.  From the remote nature of their quest arises much
+of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era.  The
+parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from
+the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on
+is the star of England's destiny.
+
+Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of
+being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal
+to statesmanship.  But the advent of that age was marked by so much
+that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic
+policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two
+nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring
+creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply
+religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those
+times.  But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift
+glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of
+the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious
+to the suspicion of theory.  The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony
+with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him
+to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending,
+often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could
+command.  And yet his career is a presage of the future.  Toleration in
+religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas
+corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much
+distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation.  And
+there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward
+Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were
+to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters.  But the year of _Mare
+Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months
+of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]
+
+But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
+revolutionists.  Revolution is the child of speculation.  The men of
+the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics.  Their mark is a
+wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
+wondrous than that of Aeetes.  But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
+the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
+the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
+Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
+though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
+last parted fatally from his companions.  Practical does not always
+mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
+to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the
+destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
+practical politicians.  In their lives, in the shaping of their
+careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
+of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
+gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
+pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
+that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
+forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
+_Samson Agonistes_--
+
+  O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
+  Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
+  Without all hope of day.
+
+But not in vain.  The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
+these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
+completed the journey which they began.
+
+We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
+empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_,
+written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
+moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
+all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Telemaque_.  It meets us
+in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
+bears about it the air of a martyr's cell.  We find it again explicitly
+in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
+Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
+last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
+moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
+mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt.  It burns
+in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
+great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
+the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
+Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
+Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
+Stuart Mill.
+
+The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
+century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
+1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
+the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
+an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
+centuries we have indicated.  The leaders in this revolution, men like
+Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
+began.  They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
+else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people
+disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
+other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
+of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
+twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
+undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations
+whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
+before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?
+
+This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
+is this.  Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
+distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has
+arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
+former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
+the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream.  Thus it has
+arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
+the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
+magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
+ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
+itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
+chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
+and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
+returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
+hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm,
+the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later
+centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned,
+far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning
+voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!
+This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.
+For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural
+design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately
+or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer
+purposes and to nobler ends.
+
+
+
+[1] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic
+reflection is simply Machiavelism.
+
+[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum
+commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in
+existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments
+which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss.  Of
+Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of
+Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so
+much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England,
+or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily.  Sulla's remark on the
+young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as
+Richelieu's on Conde or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.
+
+[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the
+continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator
+in the tragedy.  The transforming power is thus more intimate and
+profound.
+
+[4] "God in His mercy such created me
+    "That misery of yours attains me not,
+    "Nor any flame assails me of this burning."
+
+[5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between
+the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the
+singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice
+by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of
+the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases
+as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand."  "Man when
+perfected (+teleothen+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated
+from justice (+choristhen nomou kai dikes+) the basest of all."
+"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the
+destruction of a City."  The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later
+date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct
+from that which characterizes his earlier works.  The shading-in of the
+life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it
+were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to
+the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears
+as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon
+Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato,
+Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to
+imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.
+
+[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had
+before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted
+the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh.  Even their most
+speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered
+attainable by Hellas, or by Athens.  The disappearance of Socrates from
+the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of
+Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a
+concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since
+Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to
+the common life of Athens and of Hellas.  So in the England of the
+seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of
+Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical
+in their aims.  Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of
+Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord
+and its ills.  This was in 1628--fatal date!
+
+[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the
+English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell,
+Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king.  "It
+rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757.  Pitt
+was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the
+merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king,
+which led to his return to office in June.  The events of the period of
+four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the
+House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere
+enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents,
+characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756,
+Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national
+militia organized.  1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and
+conquest of Bengal.  1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg,
+three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November
+25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree.  1759,
+"year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st,
+capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the
+flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August
+19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd,
+POCOCK defeats D'Ache; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt;
+September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada;
+November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me
+alongside the French Admiral."  1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats
+Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic.  1761, January 16th, English
+enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June
+7th; October 5th, PITT resigns.  It is doubtful whether, since the
+eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European
+stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and
+the king of Prussia.
+
+[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in
+the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the
+wider in his intellectual range.  Worlds were open to his glance beyond
+the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens.  Yet Camoens is a
+heroic figure.  He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but
+to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires,
+hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen,
+thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that
+betrayed the hero.
+
+[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship;
+yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes,
+hopes of this time.  In one sentence nineteen religions are named as
+co-existing in Scotland.
+
+[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare
+Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in
+1610.  Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304
+pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for
+England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy
+over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern
+waters, and Venice over the Adriatic.  The King's enthusiasm was
+kindled.  The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State
+paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy,
+the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible
+rights of England.  Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the
+Exchequer and at the Admiralty.  A fleet was equipped, and as an
+atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King
+gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the
+noblest of Vandyck's canvases.  But Northumberland, though brave to a
+fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in
+ridicule.  Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation.  But
+in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left
+him.  To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's
+refusal.  The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to
+Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded
+events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's
+greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded
+by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold
+resolution.
+
+  Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
+  Living or dying.
+
+
+After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart
+still beat.  An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the
+time of Cromwell.  The translator was Marchamont Nedham.  The
+dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of
+the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
+
+[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October
+1st, 1801.  Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's
+speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of
+the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the
+wedding-feast of Claudius.  In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt
+declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of
+Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should
+have the benefit of the colony without its expenses.  Nelson, with the
+glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that
+in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but
+now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere
+tavern that served to delay the voyage.  The opening of Windham's
+speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all,
+France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ xxxvi, pp. 1-191).
+Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had
+passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to
+France.  Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments,
+but once understood by England there was no faltering.  Prussia,
+Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or
+alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
+England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Helene.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]
+
+In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the
+development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself
+that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions
+of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or
+dominion.  For such a study the materials are only in appearance less
+satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race.  It
+is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the
+Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that
+drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of
+performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of
+them impossible.  The reflection might be extended to other political
+revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde.  Ranke's
+indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as
+in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object
+than the impression of an impression.  No State papers, no documents,
+the most authentic, can take us further.
+
+But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet
+for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age
+discovers itself.  Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of
+thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.
+It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's
+resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the
+prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the
+records of politics.
+
+
+
+Sec. 1.  RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
+
+Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the
+development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the
+same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of
+the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which
+manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent.  The persecuting
+intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
+passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism
+or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of
+the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the
+creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists
+themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent
+or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all
+times.  The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier
+ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before
+Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its
+own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions,
+once hostile to its own.  By slow degrees England has arisen, first to
+the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of
+the truth in other faiths.  In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying
+races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the
+effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in
+Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in
+all ages, been the stamp of imperial races.  Upon the character of the
+race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the
+question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be
+exalted or debased.
+
+As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the
+tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must
+turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life
+of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain
+of to-day.  The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had
+no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of
+England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of
+Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs.  The Reformation in
+England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart
+from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in
+England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's
+consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have
+spoken at some length already.  But for the remoter origins and causes
+of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search
+not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race
+itself.  The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any
+more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs
+from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness
+with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions
+of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the
+"Whither?" of human life.  And it is the seriousness with which England
+regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it
+the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its
+sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
+swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the
+capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties.  Rome never
+endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher
+vision.  When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying.  Alaric and
+the fifth century have come.  For Rome the drama of a thousand years is
+ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly,
+tragically.  Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly?  Over
+a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on
+the still brow the secret of his own destiny.
+
+In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in
+Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion
+of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of
+flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no
+deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the
+Persian sway can be discovered.  Islam starts with religious
+aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her
+ideals dies with Ali.  At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system
+warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a
+theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their
+political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often
+ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
+
+Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the
+distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of
+its history?  Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say,
+from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
+conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the
+present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
+conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
+an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
+Divine.  From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
+arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
+justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
+freedom.
+
+Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
+between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
+far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
+found anywhere else in Europe.  Glance, for instance, at this struggle
+in Germany.  Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
+gods against Christianity.  Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
+down amongst the Saxons.  His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
+of Constantine against Rome.  Witikind does rise to the heights of
+heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
+in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror.  Mercia, the
+kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
+gods against the religion of Christ--Penda.  There is no surrender
+here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
+himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
+An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
+last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism!  He
+lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on.  There you have the spirit of
+the race.  It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
+well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
+
+King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
+mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
+death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
+seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
+with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
+sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
+little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
+darkness.  Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
+goeth we know not."  "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first
+translator, ends the passage.  Who does not see--notwithstanding the
+difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance--who
+does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the
+solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but
+which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone--+adelon panti
+plen e to theo+"?
+
+Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England
+between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted.  There in the
+seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and
+the insight which appear in other forms in after ages.  The roll of
+English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the
+sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the
+death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal
+mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee
+transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship.  The Saintly
+Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was
+given but to pray for death.  Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that
+all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and
+splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from
+a city buried deep beneath the ocean.  Instead of defiance, Rome taught
+them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the
+worship of delight, the worship of sorrow.  In this faith the Saxon and
+the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live.  But the old faith
+died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle
+Age.  Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the
+war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of
+Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics.  Yet what a contrast is
+the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard
+Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
+
+Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to
+the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings.  They are
+not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the
+wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and
+of the Northern Myths.  England as we know it is not yet formed.
+Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English
+freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned
+the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
+Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric.  To the
+religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
+bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious.  The struggle
+against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
+foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
+same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
+fourteenth century.  In the light of the future, the struggle of the
+ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
+the Heptarchic kings.  To this land of England the Vikings have the
+right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of
+supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution
+to die for that will, confers.
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
+
+The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
+Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
+like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy.  Religion is
+the philosophy of the warrior.  And the scanty records of the Vikings,
+the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
+the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
+deeply than the thoughts of the dastard.  The Normans, who close the
+English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of
+England, illustrate this conspicuously.  If the sombre fury of the
+Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
+vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
+earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
+religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested.  Europe
+of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
+each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
+Conqueror.  In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
+has few parallels in history.  He is the founder of the Mediaeval
+Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
+State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
+Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
+execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
+astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
+fail.  One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman
+genius made upon him.  It was to transform this race, the tyrants of
+the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean
+and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the
+theocratic State whose centre was Rome.  But the vastness of his
+original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose
+with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by
+Buonarroti or Tintoretto.  Yet no ruler of men had a profounder
+knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had
+rendered him peculiarly familiar.  The judgment of Orderic and of
+William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand.  But the
+Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised
+from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly
+muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our
+race.
+
+There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire,
+Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English
+historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the
+descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory
+of France.  The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the
+attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious
+study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of
+Pitt!  How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the
+Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation
+at Westminster?  Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the
+Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.
+To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which
+the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit
+they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.
+But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less
+assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen:
+to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest,
+representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars.  Nature and her
+affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither
+for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had
+preceded them.  They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute
+and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the
+most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more
+richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon,
+Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan.  And who shall affirm from what
+branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals
+sprang?
+
+Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last
+struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those
+various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred
+years make England, and who in their religious and political character
+lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
+
+Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their
+contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of
+battle and the Norman love of God.  Upon these two ideas the history of
+the Middle Age turns.  The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the
+priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar
+and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence.  Chivalry is born.
+The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in
+Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men.  From the grave of
+his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the
+beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante
+rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even
+that age has carved in stone.
+
+Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of
+Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters
+greatly.  In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty role
+which the future centuries reserve for her is portended.  The immortal
+energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in
+the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's
+desire.  We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the
+Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great
+tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more
+continuous, was not more earnest.  How singular is the chance, if it be
+chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda,
+and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart!  Upon the
+shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring
+sway.  The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory
+of Richard is there imperishably.  Richard's services to England are
+not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a
+king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
+parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
+poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
+name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
+announcing the England of the years to come.
+
+
+
+Sec. 4.  WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
+
+The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
+age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
+constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
+The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
+for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen.  In the steady
+development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
+the unwritten history of the English Reformation.  The race resolves no
+more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
+truth.
+
+Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
+In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
+Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
+last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
+appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII.  The
+statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for
+Wyclif.  The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs.  How
+shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on other
+fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
+
+The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
+of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
+determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries.  In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
+presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
+their transforming power to spiritual life.  As in political life the
+sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
+sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
+consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
+vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
+others.  For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
+to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
+only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom
+and by faith.
+
+The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a
+Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy--swept the
+Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
+herself had sought them.  This is the impulse which binds the whole
+English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
+from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle.  It is
+this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
+because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
+absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
+
+The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
+conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
+set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
+
+This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
+Reformation.  It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
+Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
+English historian has drawn his own Cromwell.  But to foreign
+historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal.  Dr.
+Doellinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
+study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
+vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by
+his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
+the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2]  This is the deliberate
+judgment of Doellinger.  It was the judgment of the peasants of the
+Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago!  Somewhat the same impression
+was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
+
+Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in
+the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole
+conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its
+idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
+same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
+We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke.  It is the essential
+thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes.  It is supremely and beautifully
+expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
+of tolerance.
+
+And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney?  One who knew him well,
+though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
+kind of divine philosophy of the mind."  Community of religious not
+less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
+Shaftesbury.  In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
+they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau.  In the
+_Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon
+which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
+State.  The Record Office has no more precious document than the
+draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
+handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
+statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
+of his own or any age.  One suggested formula after another is
+traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
+citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
+or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God."  Algernon
+Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
+their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
+of Locke and Shaftesbury.
+
+Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
+analogous to their position in politics, already delineated.  In
+politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
+and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future.  In religion
+they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
+centuries develop and apply.  Both in politics and in religion they
+turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
+consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
+Imperialism of to-day.
+
+If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
+roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
+civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
+intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
+found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
+eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
+religious.  England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
+the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the
+home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
+asylum of Voltaire.[5]  Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
+the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
+as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined.  The one is
+the organic inevitable growth of the other.  The England which fought
+at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
+Marston Moor and Dunbar.  Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
+than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
+parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
+Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
+earnestly reverent, when rightly studied.  Even its scepticism, its
+fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a
+Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long
+afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
+ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
+utter death.  And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
+outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
+constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
+comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
+great period of the _Aufklaerung_ in Germany.  Kant acknowledged his
+indebtedness to Hume.  Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
+in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
+
+Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
+_Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
+victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
+of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
+ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
+Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
+to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
+palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
+scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills.  An epic in prose--and every
+one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
+sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
+of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
+superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
+
+David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or
+England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of
+England_.  It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
+There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
+forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance.  This is not to be
+regretted.  Hume's _History of England_ is one of these books.  For
+nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English
+men and women read.  It was impossible that a man like Hume, the
+central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke,
+Shaftesbury, Gibbon--the desire for a larger freedom for man's
+thought--it was impossible for him to write without saturating every
+page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations
+could read that _History_ without being insensibly, unconsciously
+transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by
+contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
+
+Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears
+fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
+the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards
+the peoples of India, towards Islam.  Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the
+foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching
+of Mohammedanism under the Queen.  It was not only Lord Kitchener who
+built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
+
+The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead
+in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the
+analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth
+century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent
+national or feudal England.  Erigena in the ninth century surveying all
+things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison
+"through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains
+it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by
+England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest
+aspirations, the very heart of the race.  The greatest empire in the
+annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most
+tolerant.  Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her
+glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons
+of time.
+
+Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this
+transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only
+from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the
+influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the
+Oriental peoples she conquers.  The work of the Arabists of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8]
+father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
+Locke and of Hume.  The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of
+Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to
+bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to
+converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present
+century--_The Sacred Books of the East_.
+
+Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion
+and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations
+towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice,
+summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with
+the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar
+of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in
+religious life or in political life or in any other form of life.  For
+all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly
+transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of
+Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually
+between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
+
+
+
+Sec. 5.  THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
+
+Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past,
+there is one more question to consider, though with brevity.  The great
+empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia,
+Islam, represent each a distinct ideal--in each a separate aspect of
+the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems
+incarnate.  In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +to kalon+; in Rome,
+it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples,
+half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her
+kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that
+mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her
+architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy.  Other
+races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery;
+but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the
+sections of the race.
+
+What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this
+Empire of Britain represent?  Apart altogether from its individual
+ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race,
+distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the
+Persian, does it eminently possess?
+
+Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the
+beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the
+beginnings of Rome.  Who founded the Roman State?  There is one fact
+about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient,
+that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from
+every city, district, region, in Italy.  The outlaw, the refugee from
+justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless
+man--these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the
+Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced
+marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in.  This process
+may have extended over a century--over two centuries; Rome drawing to
+itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in
+fortune as the first.  Who are the founders of England, of Imperial
+Britain?  They are those "co-seekers," _conqu[oe]stores_, I have spoken
+of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to
+say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless--the fittest men
+of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but
+for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth
+and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws
+to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with,
+Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and
+followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I.  They
+come in "hundreds," they come in thousands.  Into England, as into some
+vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred
+years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and
+undivided, the English Nation.  Such was the foundation, such the
+building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its
+first beginnings this land can show.
+
+And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic
+kindred, the testimony is not less sure.  What a heaven of light falls
+upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not
+begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey--works that sum up
+an old civilization!  Already is born that beauty which, whether in
+religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever.  And it
+is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and
+of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills.  The
+infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated
+on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its
+first appearance in history.  But of England and the Teutonic race what
+shall one say?  A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
+extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
+the political, and social conditions of life.  Freedom and deathless
+courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
+accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
+touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
+Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages.  In
+the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
+upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
+Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race.  In the Faust
+legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
+attains a supreme embodiment.  In the Oriental imagination the sense of
+the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
+and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
+apathy or despair.  But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
+from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
+rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
+
+This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
+and Teutonic literature, and even in action.  The spirit which
+originates the _Voelker-wanderung_, for instance, reappears in the
+half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
+the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
+the crusades.  They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
+was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
+where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
+whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
+by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
+
+Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
+this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
+Teutonic race.
+
+And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
+attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
+dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
+epochs.  It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
+infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
+devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the
+common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls
+like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth
+and ninth centuries.  It adds the glamour as from a distant and
+enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the
+pilgrim's high endeavour.  It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners
+and made the ocean their inheritance.  In later times it reappears as
+the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate,
+yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its
+environment.
+
+If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first
+founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the
+founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the
+Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude,
+already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the
+coming harmonies, of _Faustus_ and _Lear_, of _Hamlet_ and _Adonais_.
+
+
+
+[1] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.
+Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something
+of the spirit of Arminius, _etwas vom Geiste Armins_ (_D.K.I._, p.
+112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of
+Waitz (_Verfassungsgeschichte_, iii, p. 120).  Yet the form Widu-kind
+is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the
+name.
+
+[2] Doellinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable--"Aber er
+(_i.e._, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Maechtigen, ein religioeses
+Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht,
+welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen
+den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich
+trug:--das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles
+religioesen Zwanges."  Proceeding to expand this idea, Doellinger again
+describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the
+inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern
+world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der
+Beherrscher eines maechtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkuendete, die
+dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der
+oeffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer
+zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen muessen.  Die Evangelische Union,
+welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein frueher unbekanntes und fuer
+unmoeglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen
+gluecklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und
+vorbereitenden Gruender betrachten."--_Akademische Vortraege_, 1891, vol.
+iii, pp. 55, 56.
+
+[3] The _Argenis_ was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on
+religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its
+pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even
+of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put
+in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice
+and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to
+Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria.  In the
+motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and
+requires no other.  The _Argenis_, unfortunately for English
+literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the
+vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
+
+[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface
+to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had
+already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).
+"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the
+principal occasion of our miseries and confusions.  But whatever has
+been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure.  We
+have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of
+in our distemper.  It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts
+of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst
+us, that can do the work.  The first will but palliate, the second
+increase our evil.  Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and
+impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of."  The second
+Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May
+27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human
+Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most
+eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th,
+1693.
+
+[5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when
+mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"
+an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires
+of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of
+Bolingbroke and Newton.  A hundred phrases could be gathered from his
+correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds
+serious or extravagant utterance.  Even in the last decades of his
+life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to
+Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the
+Romans, and the English"; and to Helvetius, about the same period
+(1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the
+adventurous thought of England.  He even forces Frederick the Great
+into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you
+are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we
+Germans, we have caution."
+
+[6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the
+_Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V.,
+_i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide
+scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals
+the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression
+of the world-sorrow.  Several of the more violent pamphlets on
+religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity.  He died
+in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.
+
+[7] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto
+of his _History of England_ must be measured by the standard of the
+hopes he had formed.  Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he
+had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle
+unacknowledged.  But the appearance of his _History_, two years later
+than his _Political Discourses_, was synchronous with the darkest hours
+in English annals since 1667.  An English fleet had to quit the Channel
+before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated
+at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost.  At this period the tide of
+ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.
+The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment
+deep-seated and strong.  London had not yet forgotten the panic which
+the march of the Pretender had roused.  To the Scottish nation the
+massacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge--savage, pre-meditated,
+and impolitic.  The ministry of Chatham changed all this.  He raised an
+army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of
+England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families,
+bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but
+frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred
+in the ranks of English merchants.  Hume's work was thus caught in the
+stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
+was reflected upon its historian.  The general verdict was ratified by
+the concord of the best judgments.  Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
+faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
+Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the _Annual
+Register_.  Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
+the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
+epithet.  The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
+for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study.  Nor
+did its power diminish.  It contained the best writing, the deepest
+thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
+over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.
+
+[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
+ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers.  Spinoza, for
+instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
+and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]
+
+Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth
+across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now
+control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher
+conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,
+and towards the State.  To-day a subject of more pressing interest
+confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and
+sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,
+arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears
+which compose the instant of man's life.  We are in the thick of the
+deed--how are we to judge it?  How conjure the phantoms inimical to
+truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate
+the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?
+
+Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this
+aspect I propose to direct your attention.  The separate incidents of
+the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,
+politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom
+or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the
+resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,
+alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous
+surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not
+this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries
+hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired
+to see or imagined they saw.
+
+But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the
+purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's
+sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it
+is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_.  What is its
+historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the
+presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?
+
+
+
+Sec. I.  THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative
+or absolute, of the opposing forces.  Fewer men fell at Salamis than at
+Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not
+exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the
+world.  The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with
+the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of
+the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy.  War is the supreme act in the
+life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is
+pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.
+It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever
+glorious, or swiftly forgotten.  What, then, are the principles at
+issue in the present war?
+
+The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first
+event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies
+in this force named Imperialism.  It is the first conspicuous
+expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action,
+which now as always implies heroic suffering.  No other war in our
+history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so
+exclusively the result of this imperial ideal.  Whatever may have been
+the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the
+motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal
+by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has
+been prescribed and controlled.  But the present war is not merely a
+war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.
+Thiers' refrain, _digue de l'attention des hommes_; but, like the wars
+of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war
+between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the
+life-history of modern States.
+
+In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom
+was arrayed against the principle of authority.  The conflict rolled
+hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour
+and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur,
+sublime devotion, or moving pity.  So in the war of the French
+Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the
+principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the
+combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia,
+Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most
+precious memories of mankind.
+
+In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is
+between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted.  But
+in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the
+conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often
+equally lofty, equally impressive.
+
+Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic
+in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the
+sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.
+There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at
+strife--the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which,
+for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.
+These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile
+veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose _denouement_--who dare
+foretell?  What distant generation shall behold _that_ curtain?
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
+
+In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as
+in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now
+name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting.  The empire which
+has ceased to advance has begun to recede.  Motion is the law of its
+being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death.  Thus in a
+race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is,
+Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of
+evolution it attains.  The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State
+passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or
+swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature.  No
+great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age.  The
+patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the
+actualized ideal of his time.  Eliot in the seventeenth century died
+for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would
+have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he
+would have added his great name to imperialism.
+
+The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial
+State, of a race destined to empire.  In such a State, Nationality has
+no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.
+The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in
+literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century
+belonged to the idea of liberty alone.  The part which it has played in
+Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,
+above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four
+centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power.  In
+the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were
+inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the
+rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy
+into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics
+of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these
+ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.
+
+Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents
+itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,
+and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of
+1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to
+Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.
+Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was
+a shadow from the past.  The men of that time do not differ more widely
+from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great
+figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]
+The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German
+publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of
+history that the great _role_ which it has played is transient and
+accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards
+which the life of a State moves.  It is one thing to exalt the grandeur
+of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that
+it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.
+
+Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to
+trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's
+life more auspicious.  Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be
+ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State
+system of modern Europe.  For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,
+not merely to the present, but to the future world.  Rome effaced the
+distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the
+bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,
+made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain.  To the
+cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of
+municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew
+the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age.  For this,
+Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the
+stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the
+political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,
+shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not
+from papal, but from imperial Rome.
+
+The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,
+of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle
+of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as
+humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.
+Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but
+recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other
+continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,
+and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the
+side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.
+
+Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality
+and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against
+each other.  Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,
+of which the Nation is the constituent unit.  Ancient Hellas presents a
+similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but
+the City.  There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a
+conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a
+conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic
+imperialism.  And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert
+hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war.  The issue
+is known.
+
+The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her
+empire, was a disaster to humanity.  The spring of Athenian energy was
+broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of
+government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a
+ruin.  Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the
+lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.
+
+A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as
+this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.
+
+For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of
+Athens or the Rome of the Antonines.  Britain conquers, but by the
+testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her
+confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity.  "The earth
+is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's
+secret, her empire is the highway of nations.  That province, that
+territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby
+redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.
+
+This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between
+the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality--in the
+Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality--and the vital
+principle of the future.
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
+
+But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less
+significant.  It is the first great war waged by the completely
+constituted democracy of 1884.  In the third Reform Bill, as we have
+seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their
+realization.  The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the
+fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,
+Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,
+attain in this Act their consummation and their end.  The wars waged by
+the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their
+constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig
+or Tory oligarchies of last century.  But in the present conflict a
+democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated
+by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.
+
+Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared
+together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles
+and the Islam of Omar.[4]
+
+Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted
+purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the
+ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.
+It was not Clive merely who gained India for England.  French
+incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought
+on our side.  Napoleon knew this.  What a study are those bulletins of
+his!  After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,
+assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"
+and so on till Waterloo.  His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power
+of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but
+not for ever.  The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the
+French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation.  The sarcasm,
+which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its
+edge--"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I
+opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds."  There is
+nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of
+unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,
+and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird.  The
+march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its
+primitive instincts.  The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the
+visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel
+of a cannon on board the _Muiron_.[5]  Napoleon was fighting for a dead
+ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal--how
+should he prosper?  Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine
+frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon
+policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to
+Ste Helene.  Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made
+the return of mediaeval despotism impossible.  Dying, he bequeaths
+imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of
+Faust and Helena.  How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism
+Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.
+
+The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a
+capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism.  The "Serrar
+del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic
+States.
+
+The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to
+offer a closer parallel to this of Britain.  But a ruthless fanaticism,
+religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the
+Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs.  Spain fought with grandeur,
+heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the
+suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour
+frustrate and her devotion vain.  She warred against the light, and the
+enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races
+and generations unborn.  What criterion of truth, what principle even
+of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to
+assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting
+as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our
+fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of
+Spain?  England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods
+the methods of Spain.  The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for
+the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the
+triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria?  But, it is
+urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same
+stubborn, unyielding stock as our own."  In the sense that they are
+Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the
+characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,
+and the Norseman.  The best blood of the Teutonic race for six
+centuries went to the making of England.  At the period when the
+Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the
+English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the
+empire of the future.  As for the former clause of the assertion, it is
+accurate of no race, no nation.  The history of the United Provinces
+does not close with John de Witt and William III.  Can those critics of
+the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,
+and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland
+in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,
+the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and
+in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to
+Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested
+by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of
+Amsterdam to Brunswick?
+
+The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and
+literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race
+to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.
+In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious
+oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius
+in Macedon or in modern France.  When that force is withdrawn, there is
+an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an
+Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies
+also.  In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have
+never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic
+self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.
+
+From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh
+ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations
+of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and
+Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.
+
+But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to
+the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an
+impressive and even tragic significance.  For though the stage on which
+Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is
+not less elevated and serene.  A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as
+living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the
+warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then
+through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing
+within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the
+bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.
+But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a
+dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad
+succeed.
+
+And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and
+exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam
+of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to
+every student of speculative politics at the present hour is--Whither
+will this portent direct its energies?  Will it press onward towards
+some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,
+sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically
+inexhaustible forces to waste unused?
+
+The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every
+region of that empire and from every section of that society of
+nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race
+towards the present war, are not without deep significance.  Now at
+last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with
+the English race.  The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social
+environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions,
+are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not.
+Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the
+place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within
+his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon--"Our
+life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time."
+Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast
+bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one
+hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy,
+is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and
+of the course which this people will pursue?
+
+Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word
+English People has undergone.  When Froissart, for instance, in the
+fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him
+the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black
+Prince or de Bohun.  The work of the archers at Crecy and Poitiers
+extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the
+spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included
+under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.
+
+Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as
+late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks
+which it covered in the sixteenth century.  Thus when Chatham or Burke
+speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like
+Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view.  And
+Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame
+Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo.  The
+Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its
+responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the
+whole race, is intelligible enough.  But in this point the admirers of
+the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers
+of Pitt than the followers of Chatham.  The hazard of enfranchising the
+millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British
+blood, was a great, a breathless hazard.  Might not a mob arise like
+that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage
+added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making
+the guillotine a welcome release?
+
+But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it
+is a winning hazard.  To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the
+Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,
+from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy!  _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in
+its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on
+fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of
+Sidney and Wolfe.  Has not the present war given a harvest of
+instances?  The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death
+threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell
+message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of
+Abraham--"Have we won?"  Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,
+dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me
+aside, men, and go on!"  Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and
+summoned at great odds to surrender.  "Never!" was the brief imperative
+response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot
+through the heart, he falls dead.  This is the spirit of the ranks,
+this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the
+enfranchised masses.
+
+Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated.  Neither the Peninsular
+nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,
+exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the
+self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war
+by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their
+blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had
+sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it
+with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!
+
+
+
+Sec. 4.  COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
+
+Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within
+the tented field or confined to the battle-line.  The eyes of the race
+are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts
+of the actors.  There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved
+purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,
+disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom,
+that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the
+past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not
+less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic.  Such
+manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its
+extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some
+earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising
+like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
+
+But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with
+Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism.  Now
+what is Cosmopolitanism?  It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it
+is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races.
+It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy.  It is
+the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its
+stead.  Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6]  It is the passion
+of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a
+Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of
+humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning.  But
+between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm,
+a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born
+of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is
+realized, the gulf is wide.  Napoleon knew this.  Nothing in history is
+more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from
+the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated
+sovereign, Francis II.  All his victories could not purchase him _that_!
+
+Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand
+sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the
+government, the army, the empire?  Or would they have it like the Roman
+mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire,
+battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and
+a circus ticket?  Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob
+and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space;
+but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is
+but an ignorant or a transient frenzy.  In religion itself have we not
+similar variety of expression?  Those faces gathered under the trees or
+in a public thoroughfare--the expression of emotion there is not that
+which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light
+falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St.
+Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers--but dare
+we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?
+
+
+
+Sec. 5.  MILITARISM
+
+And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite
+from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there
+is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments
+start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil
+which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and
+more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most
+reluctant.  Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the
+spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for
+all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of
+a misunderstanding or envious antagonism.  Whither is this impulse to
+be directed?  What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility
+of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this
+people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes?  How shall its
+bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from
+coalesced foes?
+
+Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole
+standpoint from which I have the right--to use a current phrase--to
+speak as an expert.  First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim
+which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen,
+the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate
+any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history.  It
+has no foundation in history at all.  Nothing in the past justifies the
+ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people.  Of an
+ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not
+disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless--who shall assign bounds to its
+devotion or determine the limits of its endurance?  I go further, I
+affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which
+England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later
+times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at
+this crisis--this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think
+no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since
+the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens--the ministry or cabinet
+which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find
+that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but
+the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of
+its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has
+marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth.  This, I maintain,
+is the verdict of history upon the matter.
+
+There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an
+argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations.  Men
+point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over
+civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from
+conscription!"  Such arguments have precisely the same value as the
+arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the
+terror of Jacobinism.  We might as well condemn all free institutions
+because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its
+abuses in other countries.  And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or
+to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an
+appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell.  Nor is
+there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,
+between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of
+Sophocles, a military State, attests.
+
+All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into
+being.  And this ideal of Imperial Britain--to bring to the peoples of
+the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher
+justice--the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that
+for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.
+Louis died.  There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage
+from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the
+just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of
+our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have
+brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise
+which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial
+Parliament is to the parliaments of the world--a paragon and an example.
+
+With us the decision rests.  If we should decide wrongly--it is not the
+loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is
+the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the
+inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes
+of the unborn.  Who can confront this unappalled?
+
+
+
+[1] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira,
+A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina.  The
+victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed
+himself in his divine mission.  Mohammed refers to this triumph in
+surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of
+Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.
+
+[2] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, _Fragmente aus der neuesten
+Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa_, Dresden, 1806,
+is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the
+classic on this subject.  It gained him the friendship of Metternich,
+and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent
+exponent of Austrian principles.  But he was sincere.  To the charge of
+being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with
+Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought.  The friendship of Rahel and
+Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion.  Nor is his undying
+hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he
+translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he
+not unsuccessfully imitated.  Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at
+Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just
+long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X.
+But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the
+strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear.  So that
+as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task.  Napoleon
+slept at St. Helena, his child, _le fils de l'homme_, was in a
+seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and
+Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; _quotusquisque
+reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset_? who was there any longer to
+remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schoenbrunn?  And yet
+exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last,
+the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833,
+announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that
+of 1789.
+
+[3] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious
+but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when
+designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution
+of 1789.  It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688
+possible.  The true comparison--if any comparison be possible between
+revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though
+following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and
+character--would be between the Puritan struggle and the first
+revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of
+James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X.  Both Guizot, whose
+memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master
+Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison--the
+latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the
+imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the
+nation.
+
+[4] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present
+work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years
+between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.
+632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,
+A.D. 661.  Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality
+of Omar made themselves distinctly felt.  During the caliphate of Abu
+Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the
+two pontificates which immediately precede his own.  Omar's is the
+determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates
+of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its
+distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of
+Islam.  The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind
+mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of
+Sulla or the Athens of Pericles.  From the Arab historians a portrait
+that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise
+with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he
+undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his
+appearance and manners which tradition has preserved--"He that is
+weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have
+made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal
+with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."
+
+[5] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and
+Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same
+visionary but mighty designs.  In Napoleon's career the voyage on the
+frigate _Muiron_ marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from
+Gaul, January, 49 B.C.  But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the
+head of fifty thousand men.  Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone.  The
+best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, the "Roland"
+of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessieres, Marmont, Lavalette, but
+to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of
+Kleber and the army of the Pyramids.  The adventure appears more
+desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited
+Napoleon at Paris.  Moreau was no Pompey.  The sequence of dates is
+interesting.  On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on
+board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he
+reached Ajaccio; on October 9th he lands at Frejus, on the 16th he is
+at Paris, and resumes his residence in rue de la Victoire.  Three weeks
+later, on November 9th, occurs the incident known to history as 18th
+Brumaire.
+
+[6] The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even the
+antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism.  Rome, Hellas,
+Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern to a _more
+excellent_ degree than other States--Imperialism is the realization of
+this power.  Cosmopolitanism's _laissez-faire_ is anarchism or it is
+the betrayal of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+WHAT IS WAR?
+
+[_Tuesday, June_ 12_th_, 1900]
+
+Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the
+political development of the national as of the civic State, and that
+to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the
+future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be
+described as democratic displays itself--a mode which in human history
+is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with
+consequences memorable to all time--the problem meets us, will this
+form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war
+not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a
+State?  Even a partial solution of this problem requires a
+consideration of the question "What is War?"
+
+
+
+Sec. 1.  THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
+
+The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as
+the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or
+from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the
+tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of
+Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the
+limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as
+just or unjust.  But another aspect of the question concerns us
+here--What is War in itself and by itself?  And what is its place in
+the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity,
+distinct from the unities which compose it?  Is war a fixed or a
+transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent,
+does its relation to the world-force admit of description and
+definition?
+
+If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive
+at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part
+which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical
+enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives,
+impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history,
+the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which
+humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another
+shape--whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a
+State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to
+the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the
+Highest Good?
+
+Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the
+conflict of two ideals.  The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a
+cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a
+profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of
+Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the
+ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which
+Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest
+trilogies.[1]  The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent
+gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and
+ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage
+to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least
+details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that
+of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and
+Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records
+were to perish.  _Qui habet tenam habet bellum_ is but a half-truth.
+No war was ever waged for material ends only.  Territory is a trophy of
+battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political
+genius, the imagination of the race.  One of the profoundest of modern
+investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the
+attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by
+which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2]
+The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops
+the latent qualities of a race.  The restless and melancholy surge, the
+wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of
+the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab.  Not the cry of
+"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by
+the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,
+spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the
+marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary
+homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of
+Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming.  To
+the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the
+transforming power of a new ideal.  The cry "_Deus vult!_" at Clermont
+marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of
+Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and
+Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the
+war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the
+troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the
+crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or
+of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.
+
+The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as
+an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and
+results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that
+indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus
+affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour--"Subit quippe etiam
+ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
+
+The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,
+reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the
+consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic
+kindred, amongst the nations of the earth.  If ever there were a race
+which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the
+Hebrew.  They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than
+Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their
+retreat by day and by night ceaselessly.  Every battle is a Lake
+Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that
+nerves the right arm of his faithful.  The forms of Gideon and Joshua,
+though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of
+their race--Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna.
+The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant
+for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of
+unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas
+Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the
+"Marseillaise," appear of no account--the _Al Naharoth Babel_--"Let my
+sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"--passing from the
+mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a
+rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when
+baulked of their God-appointed fate.  Yet on the shores of the Western
+Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they
+found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and
+Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.
+Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but
+even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of
+thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the
+character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which
+marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the
+certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he
+has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua
+of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in
+no lust for territory that these wars originate.
+
+In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war
+occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies
+in the Hebrew.  It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the
+pursuit of a fate-appointed end.  Aristotle, with his inveterate habit
+of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics,
+regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against
+the enervating influence of peace.  As the life of the individual is
+divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the
+life of the State is divided between war and peace.  But to greatness
+in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition.  The State which
+cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.
+"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State
+which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave."  Aristotle
+does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the
+sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is
+incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to
+freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that
+belongs to peace can never come.  Courage, Plato defines as "the
+knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not
+fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the
+unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that
+end is manifest.  This ideal element, this formative principle,
+underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from
+its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean
+League--from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as
+the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos
+by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last
+bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus.  It requires a
+steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of
+Greeks against Greeks--Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and
+Macedon--and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this
+consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to
+resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous
+fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of
+Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.
+
+Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's
+nature it is superfluous to speak.  As in statesmanship, so in war, he
+who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and
+thinks that all is said.  The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as
+an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the
+race that bore it to victory and world-dominion.  History by fate or
+chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius.  The
+silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of
+the _Labarum_ by Constantine heralded its decline.  With the emblem of
+humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the
+centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its
+ancient valour--as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and
+Zimisces[4]--bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman
+legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the
+ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the
+Bosphorus.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  DEFINITION OF WAR
+
+To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without
+deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element
+in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the
+present.  Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment
+of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny
+and in after ages, a profound enough significance.  Behind the
+immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the
+destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing
+relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly
+reveals itself.
+
+War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the
+State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus,
+the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment.
+Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life,
+whether of the conquering or of the conquered State.  War is thus a
+manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and
+awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man.  It is an action
+radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies,
++agoniai+, conflicts, of all life.  "In this theatre of a world," as
+Calderon avers, "all are actors, _todos son representantes_."  There
+too the State enacts its tragedy.  Nation, city, or empire, it too is a
+_representante_.  Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the
+Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the
+stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal.  A
+war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State
+analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's
+phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of
+the Summoner.  The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is
+content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny,
+and swerve not from its being's law.  Not to be envied is that man who,
+in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an
+organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God!  God is the God of
+all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the
+forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk.  A mockery?  That
+cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which
+is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in
+the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even
+through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through
+the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher
+freedom!"--is this a mockery?  Yet such is the prayer of armies.  War
+so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,
+regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or
+human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living
+and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide
+earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which
+they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come
+after them.  They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of
+achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown.  Fortunate!
+And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject
+unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so
+glorious a shape!"
+
+Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in
+poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human
+heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony
+to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence
+for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
+
+Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,
+to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their
+condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.
+Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern
+mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth
+century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of
+Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in
+the great days of Louis XV.  In the gray and neutral region where the
+spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as
+soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke
+the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to
+Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined
+limits of Greater Britain.  Of no other living writer can this be said.
+Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so
+instantly a universal hearing.
+
+How then does Tolstoi regard War?  For on this high matter the judgment
+of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny.  Examining his
+writings, even from _The Cossacks_, through such a masterpiece as _War
+and Peace_, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his
+latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his
+thought reveals itself--gradually increasing vehemence in the
+expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of
+oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by
+God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence
+turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision.  This general
+impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and
+characters.  Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say
+the Borodino, to describe?  That which rivets his attention, absorbs
+his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even
+of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle
+itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such
+spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched
+countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their
+own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the
+hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated
+limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death.  Has he the
+enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I?  In Napoleon, who in the
+sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere
+of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbe de
+Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without
+greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace,
+shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming
+myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning
+of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with
+which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat.  And the
+campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial?  Lodi, Arcola,
+Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig,
+Champaubert, and Montmirail?  These all are the deeds of Chance, of
+happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark,
+unthinking force resident in masses of men.  This is Tolstoi's
+conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the
+Semitic--its crowning glory in war.
+
+Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a
+visionary, not less great than Tolstoi--Carlyle.  Like Tolstoi, Carlyle
+is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew
+prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast
+between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's
+decrees, it is meant to be.  Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?
+His work is the witness.  After the brief period of Goethe-worship,
+from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not
+monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his
+work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,
+and the mystery of war.  One flame-picture after another sets this
+principle forth.  What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of
+Tolstoi!  Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of
+the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes.  These represent
+Carlyle in the flush of manhood.  His fiftieth year ushers in the
+battle-pictures of the Civil War--Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,
+when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation.  The greatest
+epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of _Frederick_, is
+also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings.  And
+finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the
+last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness
+of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,
+Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king.  In the last sea-fight of Olaf
+there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the
+same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when
+he wrote Valmy and Jemappes.  Since the heroic age there are no such
+battle-pictures as these.  The spirit of war that leaps and laughs
+within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of _Beowulf_ and
+the _Song of Roland_, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a
+sun.  The breath that blows through the _Iliad_ stirs the pages of
+_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick_; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,
+Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of
+modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the
+combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.
+
+Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not
+less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the
+Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes
+this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the
+circumstance of war?  To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as
+to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme
+expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic
+hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such.  To Carlyle
+war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence
+in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is
+that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above--a
+race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon
+the fortunes of the stricken field!  Carlyle, as his writings, as his
+recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the
+pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but
+are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled
+limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day
+after Borodino?  The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the
+battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker
+which discovers the united agony.  It was a profounder vision, a wider
+outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to
+that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi--the
+pathological.  And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been
+loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as
+his fathers before him have done.  Tolstoi has no system to crown, like
+Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of
+universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content.  Whither then
+shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?
+
+
+
+Sec. 4.  COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
+
+Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a
+characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays
+itself.  The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a
+native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every
+epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan
+of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider
+than Voltaire's--Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval
+Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of
+France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr.
+Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a _Catiline_, and in later life
+seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the _Emperor and
+Galilean_, in the Rome of the fourth century.  But in Russia Tolstoi
+begins, and in Russia he ends.  As volume after volume proceeds from
+his prolific pen--essays, treatises theological or social, tales,
+novels, diaries, or confessions--all alike are Russian in scenery,
+Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their
+aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs.  Nowhere is there a trace
+of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured
+Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour.  In this he but resembles the Russian
+writers from Krilov to the present day.  It is equally true of Gogol,
+of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.
+If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at
+Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene
+Pavlovna unfolds itself.  Thus confined in his range, and in his
+inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker,
+springs straight from the heart of the race itself.  When therefore
+Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the
+judgment of the race.  In his conception of war the force of the
+Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius.  Capacity
+in a race for war is distinct from valour.  Amongst the Aryan peoples,
+the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life
+unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war
+sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the
+other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for
+the realization of a great political ideal.  Thus the history of the
+two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads
+like the history of Ireland.  It is studded with combats, but there is
+no war.  The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the
+Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis.  And three
+centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the
+charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius.
+Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and
+has no intelligible end.  And the noblest figure in Czech history,
+George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[7] has etched with
+laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a
+warrior.
+
+Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic
+resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs.  His sombre
+courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace.  Eyiau and
+Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of
+his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,
+illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in
+defence."  And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an
+instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal.  War has
+served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the
+aspirations of his race.  Conceived as the effort within the life of
+the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.
+He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or
+for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive
+ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never
+used it.  Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the
+Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan
+IV, and his successors, attests this.  The Don Cossacks destroy the
+last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from
+the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of
+Ginghis.  The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of
+Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable
+conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.
+The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics
+which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting.  Indeed
+the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,
+derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable
+languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political
+indifferentism.  Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,
+is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked
+the Slav throughout history.  Catherine the Great felt this.  Its
+spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that
+now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the
+fanaticism of the Moslem."  The impressive designs of Nicholas I left
+the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which
+has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a
+pseudo-Machiavellianism.  It does not originate, like the policy which
+a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described
+or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all
+must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the
+_camerilla_ which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind
+it.  Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the
+race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and
+false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of
+_Valerie_, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the
+noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[8]
+
+Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history
+throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war.  The government
+perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who,
+unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance
+not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual
+or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic
+people.  Therefore he will not die in exile.  The bigotry of a priest
+may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government,
+instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III,
+will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan
+Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.
+
+
+
+Sec. 5.  THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
+
+There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the
+writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to
+which I must allude briefly.  There are many men within these islands,
+if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England
+in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague
+consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi
+declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ.
+This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence,
+more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may
+have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have
+now to offer.
+
+First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the
+past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most
+religious amongst the divisions of those races--the Hebrews, the
+Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii--have been the most
+warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends.  This fact
+is significant, because war, like religion and like language,
+represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.
+In a work of art, the _Phaedrus_ of Plato or the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
+of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,
+sovereign and despotic.  But as a language represents the happy moments
+of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit
+sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and
+to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of
+desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion
+the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of
+generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity
+in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the
+action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race.  Religion
+incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,
+the _will_, of a race.  Reflecting then on the part which war has
+played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those
+States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient
+features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as
+opposed to religion in general?
+
+Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is
+remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the
+faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled _My Religion_ has
+thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as
+distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have
+perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual
+utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one
+syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State
+and State.  The _locus classicus_, "All that take the sword," etc., is
+aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost
+range against civic revolt.  It is only by wrenching the words from
+their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to
+the relations of one State to another.  The organic unity, named a
+State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a
+mere aggregate of those units.  If there is a lesson which history
+enforces it is this lesson.  And upon the laws which regulate those
+unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word.  The violence of
+faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his
+utterances.  Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning
+rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the
+_Internationale_, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to
+Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in
+His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their
+fantasies.  But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the
+politics of State and State.  Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in
+His utterances, but not politics.  His solitary reference to war as
+such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it
+into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war.  And the peace upon
+which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity
+of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing.  It is the peace on
+which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises
+within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,
+of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the
+battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep
+and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert
+beneath the midnight stars.  Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his
+extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the
+same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who
+compose the State.  And of such a war as this in which Britain is now
+engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which
+in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger
+freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but
+the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being
+without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen
+the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State--who
+shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is
+contrary to the teachings of Galilee?
+
+Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of
+religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other
+means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the
+establishment of the empire of perpetual peace.  The advent of this new
+era, it is announced, is at hand.
+
+
+
+Sec. 6.  THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
+
+Now the origins of this ideal are clear.  It is ancient as life, and
+before man was, it was.  It is the transference to the sphere of States
+of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the
+soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal
+leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in
+death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the _theoria_ of
+eternity.  The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and
+Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation
+of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in
+the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.
+
+Will War then never cease?  Will universal peace be for ever but a
+dream?  Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the
+forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the
+crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages
+the imagination of a race, is instructive.
+
+In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in
+the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster.
+"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
+good tidings, that publisheth peace!"  In this and in other splendid
+pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal
+in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested!
+In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted!  But
+it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of
+yet.  It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and
+beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being,
+inviolate of Time.  Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the
+world, centres in Judaea--in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the
+overthrow of all its adversaries.
+
+Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if
+peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the
+fountain from which it must flow.  It is an imperial peace bounded by
+Hellenic civilization, culture, laws.  It is a peace forged upon war.
+Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.
+
+"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.
+Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.  For my
+brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within
+thee.'"  Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a
+Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.
+
+Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her
+dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt.  Disregarding the
+dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the
+world outside those limits.  St. Just's proud resignation, "For the
+revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of
+those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire.  To pause
+is disaster; to recede, destruction.  Rome understood this, and her
+history is its great comment.
+
+To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not
+less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high.  Neither
+Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,
+stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than
+the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the
+Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment.  Then and
+then only shall the Holy War end.
+
+The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity
+of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending.  And
+Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all
+his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of
+an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims
+fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen
+music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things
+human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian
+age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but
+the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the
+proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's
+respite to a war-fatigued world.
+
+Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the
+Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval
+Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_.  This "Truce of God" was a
+decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain
+sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against
+another which darkens our early history.  It is the mediaeval
+equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of
+Universal Peace.  Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support
+than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,
+giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever
+received.  And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace
+is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[9] This is
+conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three
+centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the
+desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.
+This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona,
+where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that
+never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to
+bear the crusaders to Palestine--yet there were neither armies nor
+ships, it was but the fever of his dream.
+
+During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded.  The
+wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds.  "I am
+not come to bring peace among you, but a sword."  Luther, for instance,
+declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the
+ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the
+Albigenses.  War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it
+became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish
+Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes.  As
+Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the
+Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the
+position of the legists of the Reformation.  In his work, _De Jure
+Belli ac Pacis_, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is
+altogether set aside.  War is accepted as existent between nation and
+nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate
+it.  Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of
+Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its
+conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions
+which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost
+observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated.  But the
+treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the
+method of his contemporary, Verulam--the method of the science of the
+future.
+
+In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable
+enthusiast, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression
+upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.
+Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the
+same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.
+It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the
+Encyclopedie.  It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording
+the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless
+paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history
+arise.  Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's
+History, but its influence disappears as the work advances.  It charmed
+the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his
+impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory
+of France.[11]
+
+Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over
+the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.
+This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"
+This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of
+Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking
+out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest
+yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our
+race.  The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years
+ending in that great manner!  Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once
+more arises.  Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till
+six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent
+conference at The Hague.  Its derisive results, closing the debate of
+the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth
+century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of
+comment.
+
+Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of
+Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all
+in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or
+Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still
+in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil
+strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments
+of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in
+Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the
+wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugene, and of
+Frederick.  The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,
+the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the
+leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods.  On the
+other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great
+thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely
+the phantom of their logic, an _eidolon specus_ created by their
+system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or
+desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all
+life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.
+
+Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life
+is answered by implication.  For the history of the ideal of Universal
+Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a
+manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as
+such, inseparable from man's life here and now.  In all these great
+wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the
+Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are
+ultimately phases of one Idea.  It is by conflict alone that life
+realizes itself.  That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of
+Being as such.  From the least developed forms of structural or organic
+nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,
+the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute.  The very magic
+of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something
+of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,
+mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across
+the abysses and orbits of the worlds.
+
+What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and
+the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born
+from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded
+struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of
+transcendent rapture and light?  By this conflict, multiplex or simple,
+the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,
+the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,
+is attained.  They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment
+of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a
+loveliness for ever.  And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the
+idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this
+_agonia_ increase.  It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest
+peace dwells.
+
+The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region
+of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.
+Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_,
+are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?
+
+And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is
+one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by
+conflict?  In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed
+of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each
+penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent
+_nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic
+all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as
+it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and
+have an end!  War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,
+there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler
+causes--but cease?  How shall it cease?
+
+Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a
+dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has
+crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,
+start from their orbits.
+
+
+
+Sec. 7.  IMPERIALISM AND WAR
+
+If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be
+asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this
+of Imperial Britain?  The effects upon war, will, I should say, be
+somewhat of this nature.  It will greaten and exalt the character of
+war.  Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of
+the present lie deep in the past.  In the wars of an imperial State the
+ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to
+the life of the present.  From the earliest tribal forays, slowly
+broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to
+the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle
+links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of
+empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice.  And this
+ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity
+of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,
+manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the
+'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes
+of a Cerdic or an Uffa.  For the State which by conquest or submission
+is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law
+of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in
+the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now
+forms a constituent and organic part.  And looming already on the
+horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to
+purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have
+greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal
+kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.
+
+Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the
+action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the
+attributes at once of the hero and the martyr.  Thus, when M. Bloch and
+similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its
+pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting
+from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of
+death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what
+end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past?  For the
+sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless
+powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished?  These
+are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the
+sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all
+untouched.  Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at
+Eyiau or at Gravelotte?  Let but the cause be high, and men will find
+means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no
+other!  And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its
+inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced.  The battlefield
+is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can
+contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent.  "The
+drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it
+deadens thought."  But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.
+Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in
+upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly.  Fighting for
+ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,
+knowing in his heart that they may never be at all.  Courage and
+self-renunciation have attained their height.
+
+Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare
+turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and
+self-directing energy.  Contemporary history makes it daily clearer
+that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever
+did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois.  Another genius and
+another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to
+celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism
+less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.
+
+Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death
+and the hour of his birth.  Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.
+In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?
+That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the
+stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present
+onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he
+has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the
+nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being.  Made
+strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full
+splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the
+battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering
+the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and
+various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to
+nature's day.  And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have
+been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the
+least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread
+pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks
+by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of
+the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry
+"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is
+lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the
+poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes
+approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.
+
+War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek
+orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with
+its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!
+And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"
+An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer
+on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more
+moving and a simplicity more heroic.  And these, I imagine, will be the
+results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its
+destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the
+State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its
+consummation there in the death on the battlefield.
+
+
+
+[1] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the
+connecting ideas of the three dramas, _Phineus, Persae, Glaucus_.  The
+trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis
+was still fresh in every heart.  The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"
+a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years
+earlier.  The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the
+conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the
+vanquished.  The cry in the _Persae_, "+opaides hellenoite+", still
+echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of
+_modern_ Greece: "+deute paides ton hellenon+."
+
+[2] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch
+alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen
+Zuegen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich
+niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des oeffentlichen und
+rechtlichen Lebens begruendet wurden."--_Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3rd
+ed., i, p. 19; _cf._ also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene
+Kriegsvoelker gegeben, gebildet durch und fuer den Krieg, nicht
+Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein fuer den Krieg
+berechnet gewesen waere, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfuersten, deren
+Herrschaft nur in Kriegfuehrung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."
+
+[3] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies
+or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian,
+combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision
+in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events,
+characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or
+tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the
+test of historical criticism.  Their tactics and the composition of
+their armies make the precise share of this or that general in
+determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.
+Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the
+Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna,
+who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.
+13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster;
+and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the
+conqueror and first administrator of Irak.  The claims of Amr, or
+Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.
+638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the
+Sword of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the
+crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may
+justly entitle him to the designation--if that description can be
+applied to any one of the devoted band--of "Conqueror of Syria."
+
+[4] "The twelve years of their military command (_i.e._, of Nicephorus
+and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.
+The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the
+skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall
+not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."--Gibbon, chap. lii.  The
+reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening
+chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, _L'epopee
+Byzantine a la fin du dixieme siecle_, Paris, 1896, which exhausts
+every resource of modern research into this period.  Zimisces' rise to
+power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century
+in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in
+Schlumberger's earlier volume, _Un Empereur byzantin_, Paris, 1890.
+
+[5] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the
+_Early Kings of Norway_.  "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon
+the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February
+15th, 1872.--Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_, vol. ii, p. 411.
+
+[6] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a
+devil-worshipper (_Data of Ethics_, Sec. 14) must be regarded less as an
+effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just
+retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig
+Philosophy of the eighth of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_.
+
+[7] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the
+native language of Bohemia possible.  Two volumes had already been
+issued in German.  If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had
+the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech
+version of Palacky's _Geschichte Boehmens_.  After two centuries of
+subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia
+awoke and discovered that she had a history.  Of the seven volumes of
+the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George
+of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).
+
+[8] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the
+Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia?  "We," Tourgenieff once
+said, "we have given the samovar."  But that poet's own works, the
+symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed
+all this.
+
+[9] Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of
+mediaeval Europe.  It drew its origins from southern France, arising
+partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and
+bloody strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by
+the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed
+and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the
+thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the
+year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn.  Ducange has collected
+the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's
+admirable work, _La Paix et la Treve de Dieu, premiere edition_, 1857,
+_deuxieme edition revue et augmentee_, 1869, sketches the growth of the
+movement.  With the eleventh century, though the social misery is
+unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of
+Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be
+observed are limited to two.  But towards the close of the century the
+rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the
+movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were
+extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the
+Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection.  With the decline of
+the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the
+influence and use of the Treuga waned.  The verses of the troubadour,
+Bertrand le Born, are celebrated--"Peace is not for me, but war, war
+alone!  What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays?  And the weeks, months,
+and years, all are alike to me."  The stanza fitly expresses the way in
+which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the
+close of the twelfth century.
+
+[10] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet,
+the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars.  It is thus
+synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and
+her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.
+St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.
+Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false
+impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil
+of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy.  An English
+translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the
+following characteristic title-page: "A Project for settling an
+Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and
+approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and
+now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of
+the French Academy."
+
+[11] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution
+as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace.  In a discourse
+delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he
+describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the
+flourishing of science and the extinction of wars."  France, he
+declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same
+time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us
+"to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure
+prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal
+peace and harmony take place."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
+
+[_Tuesday, July_ 3_rd_, 1900]
+
+Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and
+traced in the second and third the development in religion and in
+politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards
+examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War
+and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and
+even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands
+attention.  How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to
+that from which all States originally derive?  How is it related to the
+Divine?  From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that
+of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of
+this Empire of Imperial Britain.
+
+From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the
+curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the
+deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the
+nations and the peoples of the earth?
+
+Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the
+State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the
+State.  But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity
+that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it.
+Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is
+not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws
+as regulate the life of the individual.  Not only the arraignment of
+the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or
+profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle
+utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with
+the unity of the individual.  But though no composite unity is governed
+by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that
+unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as
+they change, mutually transforming and transformed.  So is this unity
+of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the
+souls of men.
+
+
+
+Sec. I.  THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
+
+Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is
+the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the
+soul of man.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,
+the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the
+higher thought of Europe.  The saint gives place to the crusader and
+scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of
+oriental paganism and oriental culture.
+
+Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like
+Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are
+profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature.  How shall
+the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the
+souls of men?  They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to
+dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile
+everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are
+appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by
+that Blood redeemed.  By what law or criterion of right does God send
+forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or
+bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the
+Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest
+of false prophets, Mohammed?  This trouble in the heart of the eleventh
+century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European
+imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first
+time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose
+heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was
+perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
+thought it vainly strove to imitate.  Underlying this trouble in their
+hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
+leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
+souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
+each mortal body immediately on its birth.
+
+Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there
+arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of
+its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children
+of men.  In the most remarkable and sublime of his six _Enneads_,
+another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1]  The fate of the soul
+in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a
+child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in
+a foreign land.  The child forgets its country and its kindred as the
+soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one
+with the Divine.  But after the lapse of years if the child return
+amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a
+word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the
+voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose
+shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and
+gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in
+upon the child--"Behold my father and my brethren!"  So the soul of
+man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine
+wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its
+heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,
+ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew
+there within the Everlasting.
+
+Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the
+problem before us.  Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of
+successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,
+permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the
+contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the
+measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.
+
+Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to
+the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the
+intelligence of the history of a day.  But as the beam of light never
+severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls within
+the caverns of the sea remains united with the orb whence it sprang, so
+the soul of man has grown old along with nature, and acquainted from
+its foundations with the fabric of the universe.
+
+Therefore when it confronts some simple object of sense or emotion, or
+the more intricate movements and events of history, or the rushing
+storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has
+within it preparations drawn from that fellowship with nature
+throughout the aeons, the abysses of Eternity.  And as the aeons
+advance, the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all its
+striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty of the ultimate
+attainment of that end increases.
+
+Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its ignorance of Eternity, it
+attains its rest in the Infinite, which seeking it shall find, piercing
+through every moment of the transient to the Eternal.  What are the
+spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds to the soul which is
+ever more profoundly absorbed, remembering, knowing, or in vision made
+prescient of its identity with the soul of the universe?  And as the
+ages recede, the immanence of the Divine becomes more consciously, more
+pervadingly present.  Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its
+destiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows of twilight, or
+in mysterious tones far-borne and deep as the chords struck by the
+sweeping orbs in space.
+
+The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue to the infinite,
+and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the
+ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge.  The past is dead,
+the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW
+the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the
+farthest presents, the most distant futures, are but changing phases.
+
+If then we regard the soul, its origin and its destiny, in this manner,
+what a wonder of light invests its history within Time!  Banished from
+its primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with what
+achievements has not the exile graced the earth, its habitation!
+Wondrous indeed is man's course across the earth, and with what shall
+the works of his soul be compared?  From those first uncertainties,
+those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly discerned as yet, lures him
+with tremulous ecstasies to eternise the fleeting, and in columned
+enclosure and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can control of
+the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.
+These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding
+his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by
+reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the
+worlds.
+
+And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn
+granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of
+Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed
+splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,
+iridescent with diamond and pearl.
+
+Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and
+moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by
+the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of
+the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer
+wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,
+and Shakespeare.
+
+And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and
+tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain
+its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on
+the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in
+wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last--in the
+_adagio_ of the great Concerto, in the _Requiem_, or those later
+strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the
+soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the
+shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,
+pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses--how dark,
+how silent!--a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first
+separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the
+ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and
+precursor yet shall know!
+
+Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things
+more excellent than man, the planets, for instance.  He is thinking of
+the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the
+keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not
+unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are
+living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and
+that fixed path athwart the night.  How much higher a will that
+steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable
+desires of human life.  But we know that the planet with all its mighty
+curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the
+moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark
+unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy
+imaginings, is accomplished.  And the thought of Pascal which might be
+a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the
+universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than
+the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to
+destroy the universe knows nothing.
+
+If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded
+and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it
+is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the
+State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should
+baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce
+them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false
+analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has
+in these lectures more than once been made.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
+
+Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual
+soul, and thence to the Divine unity.  The soul of the State is the
+higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of
+the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that
+we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual
+life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State
+in itself and by itself.  Man in such relations does often merit the
+reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of
+a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems
+often to find justification.  Similarly, the exclusive admiration of
+many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as
+opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,
+discovers in a first study of these relations strong support.  But the
+artist is not isolated and self-dependent.  If the supreme act of a
+race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme
+poems, its language--deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race
+has contributed--so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State
+affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most
+independent of the State.  The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The
+solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether
+of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that
+Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into
+the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by
+ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the
+structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that
+isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[2]  And
+who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that
+lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the
+State?  For from the same source the component and the composite, the
+constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence
+that is in each is One.  "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or
+whither shall I flee from Thy presence?  If I ascend up into heaven,
+Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.  If I
+take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
+sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold
+me.  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall
+be light about me.  Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the
+night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to
+Thee."
+
+The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives
+whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not
+write the _Ajax_ because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, _El
+Condennado_ because Cortez defeated Montezuma.  Whatever law connect
+greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause
+and effect, of necessary succession in time.  They are the mutually
+dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the
+whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose
+being are beyond the region of cause and effect.
+
+Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of
+the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the
+Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between
+the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the
+State.  The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action,
+or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident
+with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development
+the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire.  For it
+is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the
+energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds
+expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and
+art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the
+individual.  But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the
+art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis,
+the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or
+in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the
+Hellenes.  A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,
+thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.
+Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo
+and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence
+competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the
+actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest.  So in Venetian
+history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which
+succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the
+painting but to the political greatness of Venice.
+
+As in civic so in national empires.  In Spain, Charles V and the
+Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of
+the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and
+Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez.  Racine and Moliere
+serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander.  The mariners
+who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to
+the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries
+of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.
+
+Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their
+literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chenier and
+the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just.  An empire so glorious, if
+based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the
+age its sworn antagonist.  This stamped his empire as spurious.
+
+But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in
+action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect.  For the
+roots of their identity we must search deeper.  The transcendent deed
+and the work of art alike have their origin in the _elan_ of the soul,
+the diviner vision or the diviner desire.  The will which becomes the
+deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet
+one; and this _elan_, this energy of the soul, what is it but the
+energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time?
+Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration,
+imperfect, of the spirit of man.  The greatest books that ever were
+written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most
+delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever
+came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the
+soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them.  The
+unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works
+is dimly adumbrated.  The most perfect statue is but an imperfect
+semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying
+and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward
+vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic
+height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.
+
+In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself supremely, and with a
+flame-like vividness.  There the divine origin of the State which in
+the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of
+art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic
+action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned.  If
+artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the
+Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar.
+The thought and the deed, +logos kai poiesis+, here are one.
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
+
+We have now reached the final stage of our inquiry.  Is there any law
+by which the vicissitudes of the States, whose origin has been traced
+through the individual to a remoter and more awful source, are fixed
+and directed?  And can the decay of empires, those supreme forms in the
+development of States, be resolved into its determining causes, or do
+we here confront a movement which is beyond the sphere ruled by cause
+and effect?
+
+In Western Europe a broken arch and some fragments of stone are often
+all that mark the place where stood some perfect achievement of
+mediaeval architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey.  But on the
+lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a ruin hardly more
+conspicuous may denote the seat of an empire.  Such a region, fronting
+the desert, formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon his
+own destiny and that of the nations.  Those two inquiries have
+proceeded together.  His vision of the universe, original or accepted,
+inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the
+historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in
+time and space.
+
+Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,
+Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or
+applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the
+present hour.  Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations
+of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.
+
+The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of
+Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a
+divine vengeance.  The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and
+of wrong-doing.  The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption
+and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.
+Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the
+individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's
+history been decreed and proclaimed.  Hebrew thought was perplexed and
+amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and
+the unjust man, and the misery of the good.  But the sublime and
+inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the
+punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and
+States.
+
+In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout
+Greek and Roman thought.  In St. Augustine it reappears in its original
+shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of
+an historical argument.  A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful
+sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted
+by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,
+attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the
+Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it.  He sees Rome fall;
+and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome
+becomes to Augustinus--the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of
+her pride, her idolatry, and her sin.  Rome falls as Babylon, as
+Assyria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some
+fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass
+away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces
+with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.
+
+So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for the theme
+of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a
+scroll.  Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a
+procession of empires--Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,
+and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of
+Charlemagne and of the Othos.  Their successive falls point to man's
+obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of
+the Judgment.
+
+The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[4] and of the Cardinal
+Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century
+Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive
+and finished than that of Augustine himself.  In recent times this
+theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and
+Carlyle.  It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, _The
+Stones of Venice_.  The value of that work is imperishable, because the
+documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and
+sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison.  Yet its
+philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,
+and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master.  The
+bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever
+permitted himself to imagine.  In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates
+the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is
+that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era
+lies the salvation of England.  Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its
+great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of
+the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of
+Christianism of which that standard was the emblem.  But in the
+sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the
+consequence.
+
+In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State
+identical with that indicated in the second lecture.  They exhibit the
+effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a
+design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or
+ought to be.  Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty
+aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind
+assaults of fate and man.  In individual life, therefore, the primitive
+conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life
+of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the
+succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts,
+creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of
+phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the
+narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from
+detection.  Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire,
+and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the
+grave.  And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured
+amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier
+heights and the icy solitudes of thought.
+
+
+
+Sec. 4.  THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
+
+The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls
+the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons
+and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.  This theory varies little;
+the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer
+change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato
+or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or
+in the sentimental musings of Volney.  The vicissitudes are no more
+determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain
+ethical rules.  Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme
+of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws.  The
+mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with
+the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.
+
+It appears late in the development of Hebrew thought, and finds its
+most remarkable expression in the fragment, the writer of which is now
+not unfrequently spoken of as "Khoeleth."[5]  "One generation passeth
+away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.
+The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place,
+where he arose.  The wind goeth towards the south and turneth about
+unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
+again according to his circuits.  The thing that hath been, it is that
+which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done,
+and there is no new thing under the sun.  Is there anything whereof it
+may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which
+was before us.  There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall
+there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that
+shall come after."
+
+The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as
+Khoeleth, brooding on the same world-wide things.  Like him, he looks
+out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;
+like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in
+their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the
+history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its
+circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it
+came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal
+the tedious story of man.  In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,
+tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception
+recurs.  It is the central and informing thought of his life as a
+philosophical thinker.  But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming
+the slave of a theory.  He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle
+in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence
+if not rest.  Its precise character he nowhere describes.
+
+Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.
+He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the
+gloomy energy which hate supplies.  In depth and variety of creative
+insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the
+psychology of death, he stands alone.  His is the most profoundly
+imaginative nature that Rome produced.  Three centuries before the fall
+of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns
+to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in
+the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the
+fourth.  Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read
+at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,
+the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deum ira in rem Romanam_ of
+the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution
+appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,
+esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the
+havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but
+their own vengeance, do the gods desire."  It is as if, transported in
+imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the
+judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint
+Augustine.  Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and
+of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the
+wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits
+of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing.  His
+sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and
+deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.
+
+A passage in the _Annals_ may fitly represent the impression of reserve
+which these three mighty spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,
+at moments convey.  "Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in incerto
+judicium est, fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte
+volvantur; quippe sapientissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum
+aemulantur, diversos reperias, ac multis insitam opinionem non initia
+nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis curae; ideo creberrime
+tristia in bonos, laeta apud deteriores esse; contra alii fatum quidem
+congruere rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud principia
+et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen electionem vitae nobis
+relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, certum imminentium ordinem; neque mala
+vel bona quae vulgus putet."[7]
+
+And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence
+upon Thucydides.  It even forces the structure of his later books into
+the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a
+verse of Sophocles the theme.  But his earlier and greater manner
+prevails, and from the study of his work the mind passes easily to the
+contemplation of the doom which awaited the destroyers of Athens, the
+monstrous tyrannies in Syracuse, and Lacedaemon's swift ruin.
+
+Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves attention.  It was a
+habit of writers of the eighteenth century, in treating of the
+vicissitudes of empires, to state one problem and solve another.  The
+question asked was, "Is there a law regulating the fall of empires?";
+but the question answered, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, was, "Is
+there a remedy?"  Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in places to refer
+the ruin which he anticipated to Rome's departure from the austerity
+and simplicity of the early centuries.  In the luxury of the Caesars he
+discerns but another condemnation of the policy of Caius Julius.
+
+The use which Gibbon has made of this argument is celebrated.  In
+Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan
+and of Marcus, exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for
+the Republic exercises over the art and thought of Tacitus.  Both
+desiderate a world which is not now, musing with fierce bitterness or
+cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer.  Both
+ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted?  How
+could the decline of Rome have been stayed?"  Tacitus is the greater
+poet--more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,
+profounder in his insight into the human heart.  But a common
+atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and
+again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work
+gains thereby.  A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's
+_Trionfi_, or the _Antiquites de Rome_ of Joachim du Bellay, redeems
+from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march
+of many a balanced period.[8]  But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for
+a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic
+theory of the decline of empires.
+
+His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic
+purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and
+the bent of his own intellect.  He combats the same enemy as Voltaire
+waged truceless war upon--the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of
+insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and
+religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
+derived their power.  And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.
+There is scarcely a living conception in the _Decline and Fall_ which
+cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.
+Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a
+section in the _Essai sur les Moeurs_.
+
+Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient
+simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[9]  With Zosimus
+he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,
+and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred
+defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.
+This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the
+furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the
+great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail
+lavished upon the portraits of their enemies.  Half-seriously,
+half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in
+Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of
+the Antonines.
+
+And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the
+decline of Venice to its abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,
+influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall
+of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.
+
+
+
+Sec. 5.  WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
+
+Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the
+cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth
+and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that
+the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be
+averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified.  The
+mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall
+endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.
+He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the
+government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.
+And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still
+proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.
+
+But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or
+surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the
+passing of youth.  Man might as well start once more to discover the
+elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that
+shall not pass away.
+
+To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like
+pondering too curiously the question why a man dies.  In the
+vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as
+in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life.  The tracts and
+regions governed by cause and effect are behind us.  An empire, like a
+work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an
+integral portion or phase of that end.  From the concept, "Empire,"
+duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in
+the concept itself.  Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are
+alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself
+through the individual in the State.  The curve of an empire's history
+is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes.  It is a portion of
+the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades
+analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul
+which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.
+
+Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of
+a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to
+the heart's desire, is vain enough.  The Eros of Praxiteles and the
+Athene of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,
+are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover
+the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus.  But the moment within the soul of
+the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and
+completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision
+has not passed away.  It has become part of the eternal, as the
+aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or
+Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal.  Man, born into a
+world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments
+the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed.  The artist,
+the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world.  Yet is
+this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and
+change.
+
+In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes
+itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art.  The form perishes,
+nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,
+endures.  As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the
+individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or
+imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race.  It
+is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative
+purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.
+The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it.  Athene or Roma
+are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most
+subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from
+myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded.  Those
+heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a
+Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the
+State to itself, rudely or faultlessly.  Philip and Alexander, Baber
+and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than
+other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.
+The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men.  To
+Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all
+brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is
+an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the
+Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas.  Akbar started as his
+grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10]
+But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or
+heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of
+earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled
+for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon.  Apprehending the unity
+beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,
+Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and
+essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had
+done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal
+beneficence, and truth, and life.  He failed, but failed greatly.
+
+The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in
+thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of
+humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither
+converge again.  Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in
+terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of
+Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas
+as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven
+into a chain of causes and effects.
+
+Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human
+thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things.  As
+life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of
+human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize
+itself and life.  Every effect is in turn a cause.  Therefore every
+cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and
+simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued
+life of the cause.  Universes and the soul of man are but
+self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within
+Cause immortal, effect within effect unending.  "Man," it has been
+said, "is the inventor of Nothingness.  Nature and the Universe know it
+not."  The past wields over the present a power which could never be
+derived from Death and Nothingness.  No age, as was pointed out in the
+first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present.  As if
+we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of
+the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the
+scenes designed for other eyes.  Even our most living impulses we
+interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,
+so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were
+dead.
+
+But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when
+most deeply absorbed in the past.  The soul of man is the true Logos of
+the universe.  It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of
+the aeons is it a stranger.  It heard the informing voice which
+instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the
+bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and
+the hills about them like a covering of flesh.  Therefore time and
+death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets
+over against the substance which lives and is eternally.
+
+And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than
+elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,
+the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change
+them, and they shall be changed," seems realized.  The death of a
+State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which
+a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their
+ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is
+secured.
+
+In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled
+splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary
+eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,
+which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become
+the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse
+phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."
+Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs
+pursued--tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,
+national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of
+glorious wisdom--all or any of these might have warded off the doom of
+Portugal and of the house of Avis.  Bur these things were not in the
+blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da
+Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral.  It is as vain to seek in
+depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the
+Inquisition or the Papal power.  Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,
+would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be
+overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the
+nation which creates it.  If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the
+soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the
+question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which
+acts in this manner?  What is the ideal powerful enough to make the
+hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?
+The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[11] is not
+a nation of adventurers.  Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the
+Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here.  Dom Sebastian's
+device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of
+which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero--"A
+glorious death makes the whole life glorious."  And the genius of the
+nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death.  To Portugal Dom
+Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the
+far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,
+whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of
+Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few
+faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their
+fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever
+is memorable in their later history.
+
+Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,
+which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths.  Spain, as
+Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as
+England acted.  Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the
+Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power
+pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and
+for two generations made the Crusades live again.  It is another
+Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness.  She defies
+Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[12] as she had
+defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.
+
+Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,
+in the life of States and in human destiny.  Roman grandeur is not dead
+whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive.  To Petrarch
+the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,
+and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.
+
+For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for
+humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her
+language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other
+races and to other times.  In the world's _palaestra_ she had thrown
+the _discus_ to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as
+Rome was dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle to
+surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.
+
+For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this
+Empire of Britain?  In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception
+of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending
+over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the
+still brow the secret of his own destiny.  Rome does not die there.
+Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and
+all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six
+hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most
+penetrating, and all-informing.  Roman definiteness of thought and act
+were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.
+From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative
+justice is born.  Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius
+which was Rome still pulses within it.  By the energy of feudalism the
+ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.
+Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the
+famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills
+with its radiance a darkened world.  Religious oppression is stayed,
+but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,
+what a temple is reared for it by the Seine!  And now in this era, and
+at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more
+alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely
+to make here its lasting mansionry.  For in very truth, in all that
+freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,
+is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the
+vanguard of humanity?
+
+Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,
+of Assyria.  In her purposes their purposes lived.  Mediaeval
+imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome.  In Britain the
+spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation.  The form decays, the
+divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,
+indestructible.  And thus the destiny of empires involves the
+consideration of the destiny of man.
+
+
+
+[1] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical
+text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as
+follows:
+
+[Illustration: Greek text]
+
+[2] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et
+agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs
+better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism
+of the State.  Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.
+Spinoza, if this were written _circa_ 1665, has in view, perhaps, the
+Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port
+Royal aux Champs.
+
+[3] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast
+intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance
+which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the
+imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe
+alone of moderns have the power to reproduce.  The _De Civitate_ is his
+greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in
+intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery
+and diction.  The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and
+the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has
+curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan
+poetry.  Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme.  Criticism
+indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the
+comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the
+men of after times who loved them most--Tacitus and St. Augustine,
+Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.
+
+[4] The _World-History_ of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the _De
+Civitate_ of St. Augustine.  He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"
+_i.e._, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval
+standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the
+year A.D. 1146.  His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the
+Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole.  He is uncritical in
+the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his
+habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval
+monastery invests the work.  In the following year he started on the
+crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote
+his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the
+emperor Barbarossa.
+
+[5] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this
+word have all been disputed.  Thus the use of the original is
+convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories
+of theologians or Hebraists.  Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with
+scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses
+both erudition and charm.
+
+[6] What figures from the _Comedie Humaine_ of Roman society of the
+first century throng the pages of Tacitus--Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso,
+Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo,
+Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women
+of the _Annals_--imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or
+loyal--Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of
+Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia
+Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!
+
+[7] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the
+earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as
+follows:
+
+"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine
+judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and
+immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and
+fortune.  For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted
+wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do
+varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods
+have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all.
+Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with
+so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so
+great prosperities.  Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and
+destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at
+all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of
+naturall causes as from their beginning.  And these graunt withall,
+that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being
+once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our
+end.  Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the
+vulgar do so call."
+
+Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile
+commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the
+sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.
+
+[8] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's _Triumphs_.
+The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in
+the studied pages of his confessional--the Latin treatise _De Contemptu
+Mundi_--pervades these exquisite poems.  Du Bellay's _Antiquities_,
+which Spenser's translation under the title of _The Ruines of Rome_ has
+made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon
+the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558.  The beautiful
+_Songe sur Rome_ accompanied them.  Two years later Du Bellay, then in
+his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died.  The preciousness of these
+poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend
+of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's _Ballades_ to the
+passing of empires and of Rome.
+
+[9] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of
+Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official
+of high rank at Constantinople.  The fifth and sixth books deal with
+the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city
+by Alaric (A.D. 395-410).  Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the
+revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new
+religion.  The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the
+brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship
+and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing
+designs of the Emperor Julian.
+
+[10] Baber's own memoirs, _Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber,
+emperor of Hindustan_, one of the priceless documents of history, show
+the manner in which he conceived his mission.  Here is his account of
+the supreme incident in his spiritual life; "In January, 1527,
+messengers came from Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of
+Mewar, and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the west.  On
+February 11th I went forth to the Holy War.  On the 25th I mounted to
+survey my posts, and during the ride I was struck with the reflection
+that I had always resolved to make an effectual repentance at some
+period of my life.  I now spoke with myself thus--'O my soul, how long
+wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin?  Not bitter is repentance:
+then taste it thou!  Since the day wherein thou didst set forth on a
+Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes for thy salvation.
+And he who sacrificeth his life to save his soul shall attain that
+exalted state thou wottest of.'  Then I sent for the gold and the
+silver goblets, and broke them, and drank wine no more, and purified my
+heart.  And having thus heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings
+of peace, and being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I
+commanded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war against the
+evil in our hearts."  Such was the mood in which, on the 24th of the
+first Jemadi, A.H. 933, Baber proceeded to found the Mogul Empire.
+
+[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles
+south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578.  The king, Dom
+Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.
+As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal
+which had not its dead to mourn.
+
+[12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,
+along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most
+memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying
+lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting
+has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger
+Cagliari.  Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the
+seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605.  It consists of two works--the
+_Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up
+for the secret use of the Council of Ten.  Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems
+to have lived with a pen in his hand.  His manuscripts in the Venice
+archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes.  The first collected edition
+of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the
+Bastille.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+[_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900]
+
+Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast
+through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of
+things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires
+exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual
+happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,
+unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history
+to the present hour.  They are ancient as the rocks and their musings
+from eternity, inextinguishable as the _elan_ of the soul imprisoned in
+time towards that which is beyond time.
+
+And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to
+render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real
+Illusion--more poignant.  Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are
+mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1]
+when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.
+
+Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the
+study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or
+life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers.  Nothing so
+instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under
+"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,
+states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such
+attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the
+ordinances of the world.
+
+  Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.
+  Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]
+
+
+Nor does this result in the mood of Candide.  The effort unconquered
+and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it
+is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in
+very truth it is.
+
+Thus we are prepared to consider the following question.  Given that
+death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will
+this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall?  Will the form
+it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of
+Akbar, have passed away?  The question resolves itself into two
+parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist?  And,
+secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or
+gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to
+determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or
+Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?
+
+
+
+Sec.1.  THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
+
+First of all with regard to the former question.  Recent studies in
+ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies
+of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not
+the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of
+recently civilized races.  Yet this assumption still underlies much of
+the current speculation on the subject.  Last century it was received
+as an axiomatic truth.  Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic
+interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in
+them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus.  Not only
+Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,
+as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.
+Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their
+customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _litterateurs_
+indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi
+they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document
+lasting as the _Germania_.  Such comparisons are still at times made,
+but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;
+both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only
+in appearance.  It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood
+and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with
+many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius.  It
+is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the
+youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in
+refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of
+political energy.  The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like
+Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of
+philosophy.  Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor
+"Wertherism" for the battlefield.
+
+But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth
+consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to
+frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great
+political end.  Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the
+influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a
+youthful race.  The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in
+Europe.  Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its
+society alike attest this.  Superstition is not youth, else we might
+look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the
+cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future.  And
+prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be
+governed, as the genius to govern others.
+
+And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown
+that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,
+either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.
+
+The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities
+of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as
+was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,
+and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.
+
+The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the
+Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad.  It is
+a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not
+only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in
+individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments
+of history and of life, the original stock asserts itself.  The State
+is young; but the race is precisely of the same remoteness as Britain
+and the Greater Britain.
+
+Passing to the second point--at what epoch do we now stand as compared
+with Rome or Islam?  It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged
+empire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly rest upon a
+misapprehension, first, of the period in which the Nation of England
+strictly speaking arises, and secondly, of the period in which the
+Empire of Britain arises.
+
+The traditional date of the landing of Hengist does not indicate a
+moment analogous to the moment in the history of Rome marked by the
+traditional date of the foundation of the city.  The date 776 B.C.
+marks the close of a process of transformation and slow revolving unity
+extending over centuries, so that the era of Romulus and the early
+kings, Numa, Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch in Rome's
+history analogous to the period in England's history between Senlac and
+the constitutional struggle of the thirteenth century.  The former is
+the period in which the civic unity of Rome is completed.  The latter
+is the period in which the national unity of England is completed.
+Rome is now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, _urbs
+Roma_, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is finally
+conscious to itself of its career as a nation.  Magna Carta and the
+constitutional struggle which followed may be said to determine the
+course of the national and political life of England as much as the
+Servian Code founded the civic unity and determined the character of
+the constitutional life of Rome.
+
+And, as was pointed out in an earlier lecture, already in Rome and in
+England there are premonitions, foreshadowings of the future.  The
+design of the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal
+city, and the devotion of the _gens Fabia_ announces the Roman legion.
+And in those wars of Crecy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless
+heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the
+chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the
+squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of
+fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"?  And in 1381,
+the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of
+the archers of Crecy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and
+wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of
+England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism
+and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and
+warlike of the present hour?  So that even as a nation, about eighteen
+generations may be said to sum England's life, whilst, as we have seen,
+Britain's conscious life as an empire extends backwards but to three
+generations or to four.  Thus if the question were asked, With what
+period in the history of Rome does the present age correspond?  I
+should say, roughly speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus
+and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three hundred years to
+run; and in the history of Islam, with the period of the early
+Abbassides, when the fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four
+centuries removed.
+
+Does this justify us in inferring that the course which England has to
+run will extend still over three centuries and that then England too
+will pass away, as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away?  So
+far as the determination of the eras in our history which correspond in
+development to eras in the history of Rome or of Islam is concerned,
+the inference from analogy possesses a certain validity.  And the
+accidental or fixed resemblances between the empires of Islam,[3] Rome,
+and Imperial Britain are numerous and striking enough to render such
+comparisons of real significance to speculative politics.  But the
+similarity in structural expansion or in environment which can be
+traced throughout the completed dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found
+only in the initial stages of Imperial Britain.  Then the argument from
+analogy fails, and our judgment is at a stand.
+
+Assuming that each imperial race starts its career dowered with a vital
+capacity of definite range, and allowing for the necessary divergences
+in their course between a civic and a national state.  Imperial
+Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the present era to have
+reached a stage represented by the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to
+proceed further is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that now
+arises between the circumstances of the two empires.  During the
+present century the vast transformations which have been effected by
+science in the surroundings of man's physical life make all speculation
+upon the duration of Imperial Britain by analogies drawn from the
+duration either of Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash.
+
+The growth of the idea of freedom, and the modern interpretation of
+that idea in the spirit of Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the
+English nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks to a
+degree unparalleled in the ancient world.  The self-recuperative powers
+of the race have been strengthened by the course of its political and
+religious history.  Fresh blood adds new energy to effete stocks.  The
+effect of this restorative power from within is heightened in manifold
+ways by such a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomotion
+which have arisen during the past two generations.
+
+In the age of the first conscious beginnings of Imperial Britain, the
+communication between the regions of the empire was as difficult as in
+the Rome of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness has been
+synchronous, not only with increased intercourse between the ranks of
+the same nation, but with increased intercourse between all the various
+climes of an empire upon which the sun never sets.  From city to city,
+from town to town, from province to province, from colony to colony,
+emigration and immigration, change and interchange of vast masses of
+the population are incessant.  This increased intercommunication
+between the various members of the race, the influences of the change
+of climate upon the individual, aided by such imperceptible but
+many-sided forces as spring from the diffusion of knowledge and
+culture, mark a revolution in the vital resources and the environment
+in the British, as distinguished from the Saracenic or Roman race, so
+extraordinary that all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated
+is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses as to be useless
+or misleading.
+
+Nature seems pondering some vast and new experiment, and an empire has
+arisen whose future course, whether we consider its political or its
+economic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves conjecture
+behind.  The world-stage is set as for the opening of a drama which, at
+least in the magnitude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance
+of its action, will make the former achievements of men dwindle and
+seem of little account.
+
+
+
+Sec. 2.  THE DESTINY OF MAN
+
+At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections,"
+by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial
+Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as
+we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of
+past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to
+the destiny of man.
+
+To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had
+left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision
+of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther
+from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair
+of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus
+Lucretius.
+
+This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden
+receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the
+dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or
+philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the
+Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western
+Isles.  Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which
+awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,
+as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which
+Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.
+
+But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which
+Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian
+dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and
+of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,
+perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of
+poetry.  In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul
+at death.  Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from
+this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,
+which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances
+swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial
+Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future.  Thus, as the
+immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the
+desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so
+has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope.  Man,
+tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least
+intimations of Reality.
+
+But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the
+interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain
+characteristics in common.  From far behind to far in front the dream
+has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to
+horizon, but it remains one dream.  The earthly Paradise of the social
+reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and
+devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic
+evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding
+from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy
+and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the
+Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but
+in diminished beauty and poetry.  The dream of unending progress is
+vain as the dream of unending regress.[4]
+
+Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile
+are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued
+bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with
+delineations of torment and endless woe.  And Aeschylus has remarked,
+and La Rochefoucauld and Helvetius bear him out, how much easier a man
+finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in
+his joy.
+
+Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the
+depravity of the human heart.  They are the recognition by the dark
+Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the
+Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to
+the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on
+this earth, perfect peace is a mockery.  But in Time, misery is the
+soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments
+of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative.  They are the
+moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from
+stress of agony or delight or mere weariness.  Therefore with
+stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to
+grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;
+therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell
+succeeds.
+
+It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the
+infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the
+soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable
+of the only reality, the Eternal Now.
+
+
+
+Sec. 3.  THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS
+
+The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the
+Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most
+significant features of the present age.  Its dominion over art,
+literature, religion, can no longer escape us.  It is the dominant note
+of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of
+the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides
+itself.  A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a
+consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations
+of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.
+
+The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal.  The European of that
+age is a visionary.  The unseen world is to him more real than the
+seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the
+soul from earth to heaven.  The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw
+night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining
+battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the
+world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and
+Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times
+looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but
+phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.
+
+But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of
+the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour
+is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable
+pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,
+his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the
+ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in
+accepted defeat or in formulated despair.
+
+With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the _Wahn_ of religious
+freedom.  The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,
+crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes--but shall not
+the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the
+pure faith of primitive times?  When the last of the scholastics was
+being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless
+task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of
+four centuries.
+
+The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort
+of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,
+nearer to the truth.  The successive phases of this struggle may be
+compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and
+setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,
+the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and
+Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,
+learned the value of the word of a king.  Martin Luther is the
+protagonist of the first of the four great dramas that follow.  Its
+theme is the consecration of man to sincerity in his relations to God.
+There, even at the hazard of death, the tongue shall utter what the
+heart thinks.
+
+The second drama is named _Ignatius Loyola_; the theme is not less
+absorbing--"Art thou then so sure of the truth and of thy sincerity, O
+my brother?"  Whatever his followers may have become, Don Inigo remains
+one of the most baffling enigmas that historical psychology offers.
+From his grave he rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are the
+acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty.
+
+What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of the third drama--Thurn,
+Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Conde, Oxenstiern!
+And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the conflict between
+moribund Jesuitism and Protestantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay
+aside their masks in the world's great tiring-room of death, a new Age
+in world-history has begun.
+
+As religious freedom is the _Wahn_ of the Reformation drama, so it is
+in political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself.
+Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use
+of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the
+dark places of the world!  This is the new avatar, this the glad
+tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age.  Of
+this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most
+perfect expression.  What is this faith for which Condorcet and his
+party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the
+guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths--Vergniaud,
+Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, Gensonne, Petion, Buzot, Isnard?
+"Oh Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!" was not a reproach,
+but, in the gladness of the martyr's death which consecrated all the
+life, it was the wonder, the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace
+in some deeper reconcilement.  Behold how strong is their faith!  Marie
+Antoinette has her faith, the injunction of her priest, "When in doubt
+or in affliction, think of Calvary."  Yet the hair of the Queen
+whitens, her spirit despairs.  The Girondinist queen climbing the
+scaffold, not less a lover of love and of life than Marie
+Antoinette--what nerves her?  It is the star of the future and the
+memory of Vergniaud's phrase, "Posterity?  What have we to do with
+posterity?  Perish our memory, but let France be free!"
+
+How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these
+men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,
+witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other
+two for which saint and reformer died!  And their battle-march, which
+is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,
+the vision of the future of the world, which closes _Hellas_.
+
+This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith
+that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in
+political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.
+Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young,
+for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille
+Charles James Fox sees it arise.  "By how much," he writes to a friend,
+"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!"  Its
+presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed.  Wordsworth,
+Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!
+The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human
+heart!  First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!
+
+This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath
+to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its
+poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy.  It is the
+faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart
+Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the
+Girondins.  For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the
+federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the
+Second Age pass.  Not in political any more than in religious freedom
+could man's unrest find a panacea.  The new heavens and the new earth
+which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw
+beyond the sunset.
+
+And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of
+space and search the depths of time?  If the utmost dreams of science,
+and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if
+the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of
+every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure
+analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the
+annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle
+brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave the spirit
+unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its
+infinitude.
+
+The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age
+are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet.  As Mirabeau, the
+intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that
+principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,
+from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in
+its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that
+_bienfaisance_ which the Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be
+styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond
+the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood.  In over a
+hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,
+Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them
+even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his
+faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,
+education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free
+trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind.  It is in
+this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central
+thought of his system is developed.  He may have derived it from
+Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest
+biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later
+writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to
+scientific rule and line his living thought.  Where they most are
+faithful, there his followers are greatest.
+
+In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find
+scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the
+speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume
+after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,
+only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,
+tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of
+earlier times.
+
+Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an
+eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that
+there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.
+A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,
+recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has
+invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting
+and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of
+Phidias.  In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat
+of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of
+Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!
+
+Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of
+the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius
+imparts.[6]  But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade
+the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek
+its peace where he himself had found it, in Art.  So the labour of the
+scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's
+spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.
+The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working
+obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in
+the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence
+in proclaiming its unknowableness.  Glimmerings from the Eternal visit
+the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the
+incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it
+were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.
+
+
+
+Sec. 4.  THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
+
+But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the
+Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined.  For the
+soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the
+deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the
+body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,
+sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in
+Time nor its going down in Space.  Nor is it in knowledge, whether of
+the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,
+legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a
+vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not.  Then
+instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or
+theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which
+man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being
+play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a
+scroll.  The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an
+azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced
+in ecstasy.
+
+For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the
+prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,
+but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that
+Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time
+realizes as the Deed.  Man looks to the future and the coming of
+Eternity.  How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?
+Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_.  And if the
+high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the
+worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the
+dreamer and the dream are God.
+
+If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.
+There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins.  And thus the
+spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in
+defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.
+
+Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,
+flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn.  Man's
+spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an
+ever deeper reality.  The race, too, like the individual and the
+nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy.  Once more, in the way of a
+thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning
+manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless
+can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms
+of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back
+upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite
+through the finite.
+
+This mystic attribute, this _elan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship
+in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment.  It is,
+for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert,
+and Carlyle possess in common[8].  These men are not as others of their
+time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,
+whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.
+
+The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the
+Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of
+the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the
+monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,
+the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course
+curiously similar.  Flaubert has a wider range and more varied
+sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally
+surpasses him.  Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in
+ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the
+dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.
+
+The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage
+from the _Correspondance_ of Flaubert in his first manhood.  In Saint
+Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as
+Carlyle found in Cromwell.  To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to
+that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of
+time?  Man's path is to the Eternal--_dem Grabe hinan_--and from the
+study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same
+embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."
+
+And if, in such later works as Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ and the
+_Latter-Day Pamphlets_ of Carlyle, only the difference between the two
+minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in
+temperament.  It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the
+artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
+
+The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the
+same--the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite
+and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the
+transient.  Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with
+which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of
+modern science and mechanical invention.  But whether surveyed with
+contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an
+unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the
+same--"the eternities, the immensities."[9]
+
+And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of
+Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies.  Love's mystery is
+deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch
+by the breath of the grave.  The desire of the infinite greatens the
+beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural
+radiance.  All knowledge there becomes wonder.  Truth is not known, but
+the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with
+it eternally.
+
+Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists,
+formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the
+worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of
+the infinite.  The achievements in art most distinctive of the present
+age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim
+the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the
+immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,
+the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of
+unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the
+retina of the eye.  "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw
+a line," said Hokousai.  It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to
+create a world."
+
+The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift
+influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply
+defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be
+hard to over-estimate.  The nation undowered with such an ideal,
+menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a
+protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in
+the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and
+commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.
+
+But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics
+from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public
+affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their
+characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell.  For
+not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this
+conception robed in something of its initial wonder.  These, the
+individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,
+aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.
+
+And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the
+divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism
+itself.  Life is greatened.  The ardour of the periods of history most
+memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the
+energy of the Renaissance.  A higher mood than that of the England of
+Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day.  Man's true peace is
+not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a
+work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to
+the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion
+of the world, but of God.
+
+Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,
+one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"
+in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than
+auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men?  As Puritanism
+seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of
+the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.
+Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the
+"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and
+Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,
+wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that
+passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.
+
+
+
+Sec. 5.  THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
+
+Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above
+speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the
+soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist.  It is an
+affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,
+the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts
+of men.  "Im Anfang war die That."  The "deed" is nearer the eternal
+fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that
+work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in
+this or that deed.  In painting, that impressionism which loves the
+line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its
+emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine
+thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter
+flows.  A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's
+lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into
+living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from
+which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's
+ecstasy or mystery derives.
+
+In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always
+been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure.  Indefiniteness is far from
+proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal.  "A
+man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know
+whither he is going."  What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours
+of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man
+and the limited, precise ends of common days.  Upon such a subject
+Cromwell has the right to speak.  Great himself, he was the cause of
+the greatness that was in others.  But in all things it was still
+Jehovah that worked in him.  Deeply penetrated with this belief,
+Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his
+thought.  Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.
+
+Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in
+the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free.  The
+conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the
+world.  The individual will stands aside.  The Will of the universe
+advances.  Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark
+background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in
+mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings
+to this high, dread, and austere power.
+
+So of empires, of races, and of nations.  A race never goes so far as
+when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the
+consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little
+way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final
+task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.
+Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of
+the divine purposes.  It is the identity of the desire of the race with
+the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the
+motion of tides and of planets.
+
+
+Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of
+the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those
+empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw
+ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to
+live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black
+portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within
+the mind?  Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the
+amphitheatre of Rome?
+
+Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and
+public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated
+through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is
+enacted.  Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a
+vast amphitheatre?  And towards the mortal arena the empires of the
+world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful
+throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,
+the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's
+chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon.  And their resolution,
+serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,
+imperator, morituri te salutant!  Hail, Caesar, those about to die
+salute thee!"
+
+And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within
+its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed
+mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,
+deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the
+funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead
+yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,
+laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence
+sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.
+
+
+
+Sec. 6.  BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE
+OF THE PRESENT
+
+Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for
+another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have
+striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of
+Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny.  Fixed in her resolve, the
+will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course?  The narrow
+space of the path in front of her that is discernible even
+dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?
+
+Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a
+principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of
+Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of
+conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict.  The
+scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but
+the pragmatic expression of this mystery.  Here is the metaphysical
+basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in
+human art, in human action.  And thus that law, which, as I pointed
+out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in
+the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in
+interpreting the last transformation of all.
+
+The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the
+domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial
+Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of
+the idea incarnate in Hellas.
+
+The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as
+the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished
+systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons.  But the
+Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished
+races and through vanished universes.
+
+Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations
+undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the
+foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly
+imagined.  For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no
+altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater
+than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat.  Throughout her
+bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the
+village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall
+find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,
+and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil
+his being's supreme law.
+
+The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the
+summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the
+paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.
+Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind.  And thus Britain
+shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,
+the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.
+
+Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of
+religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is
+compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,
+in social institutions.  Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.
+
+Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the
+Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this
+ever more clearly.  Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the
+Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius.  In the
+fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less
+divinely missioned than the Hebrew.  Though contemporary of the
+generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an
+Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of
+light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source
+and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe
+itself, and all the desires of men.  In an age which silenced the
+scholastics he founded Hell in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a
+traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the
+great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on
+his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab
+poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.
+
+What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the
+wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that
+already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner
+music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great
+Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the
+achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious
+cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the
+mind of man?
+
+And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought
+of Dante's!  No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which
+is based on religion.  Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,
+all break before its presence.  What a light is cast upon the deeper
+places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the
+seventeenth century!  Genius for religion is rare as other forms of
+genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the
+State its rank is primary.  In the soul, religion marks the meridian of
+the divine.  By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of
+all else in life is tested.  And there is nothing which a race will not
+more willingly surrender than its religion.  The race which changes its
+religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and
+ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience
+or neglectful by despair.
+
+In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present
+attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent
+humanity.  She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with
+sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others.  And confronting her
+at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of
+Akbar, and more auspicious.  Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and
+worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design.  The forms,
+the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no
+integral part of that religion's life.  Even when by the progress of
+the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which
+time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are
+cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.
+But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of
+its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes--these are beyond the
+touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man.  Inseparable
+from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life
+changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine
+whence they came.  The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away
+the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized
+around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its
+loveliness.  Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,
+the _idea_ enshrined in the Athene of Phidias, the immortal cause of
+its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought
+immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.
+
+But a greater task awaits Britain.  Among the races of the earth whose
+fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent
+upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain
+that harmony which Dante discerned?  What empire, disregarding the
+mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,
+institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by
+inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly
+opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing
+all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,
+institutions, rites, and creeds?  Nature and the dead shall lend their
+unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes!  Thus will Britain turn to
+the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the
+religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.
+
+The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed
+from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the
+artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening
+intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing.  Man grows
+conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the
+round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to
+be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the
+Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task
+exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde
+"patriotism"?  For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,
+hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more
+impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.
+This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is
+already by her past committed.  The task is great, for between
+civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity,
+suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying.  From this the Greek division
+of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it
+possesses.
+
+In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the
+subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and
+religions of the world, the short space that is illumined of the path
+in front of Britain does unmistakably lead.  Every year, every month
+that passes, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny
+which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race.  The actions, the
+purposes of other empires and races, seem but to illustrate the
+actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its
+relations to Humanity.
+
+Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall,
+it will at least be as that hero of the _Iliad_ fell, "doing some
+memorable thing."  Were not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to
+incur the taunt, _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_, or that cast
+by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," _a
+Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui_, "hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God"?  The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and
+by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst,
+in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in
+suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in
+triumph or defeat, to eternity.
+
+There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember
+the dead.  Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much
+things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought
+of every hour.  In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest
+counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing
+eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are
+not yet.  Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or
+statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died,
+and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned
+that they laid the foundations of this Empire.  Masters of their own
+fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges
+unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or
+possessors.  But they set higher store on glory than on life, and
+valued great deeds above length of days.  They loved their country,
+dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for
+that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of
+the divine within such life, that they fought and fell.  And this great
+inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief
+inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.
+
+And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise,
+and with phantom fingers beckon England on!  From the fields of their
+fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort
+arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour.  And lo!
+gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call,
+clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of
+hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other
+wars--Brunanburh and Senlac, Crecy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.
+_Their_ battle-cries await our answer--the chivalry's at Agincourt,
+"Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout,
+which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts!  The Lord of
+Hosts!"--these await our answer, that response which by this war we at
+last send ringing down the ages, "God for Britain, Justice and Freedom
+to the world!"
+
+
+Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a
+challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the
+future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our
+race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so
+remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.
+
+With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this
+generation.  Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more
+imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this
+nation and to this people.  And, again, if we should hesitate, or if we
+should decide wrongly, it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the
+narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead and the
+despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to
+us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.
+
+
+
+[1] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta
+idea" and the "inadequat[oe] idea"; but the distinction above flows
+from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not
+Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.
+
+[2] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht;
+    Der Herr der Schoepfung hat alles bedacht.
+    Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,
+    Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.
+          GOETHE, _West-oestlicher Divan, Buch der Sprueche_.
+
+[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic
+Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan
+Arabia.  "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which
+Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the
+eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam
+offers a fair field for speculative politics.
+
+[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of
+this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into
+a mockery.  (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and
+Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)
+
+[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest
+works of its class in French literature.  Turgot's was one of those
+minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter
+bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.  The fogs and mists
+of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed
+out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot.  And a fragment written by Turgot
+in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title
+of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.
+
+[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary
+principles abound in Goethe's writings.  The violence of the first
+impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a
+climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories
+of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in
+his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a
+large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of
+Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to
+German politics and to the War of Liberation.  Even of 1809, the year
+of Eckmuehl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German
+freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful
+returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"
+and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought
+quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
+
+[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a
+taille un camee litteraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi
+rigoureuse perfection de forme."
+
+[8] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived
+through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of
+the other's work.  Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.
+Indeed _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, though read by a few, was
+practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date
+when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more
+detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to
+Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness.  Schopenhauer, on the
+other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's
+essays on German literature in the _Edinburgh_, and though ignorant as
+yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of
+English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.
+But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's
+teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the
+opportunity often presents itself.  Wagner, it is known, was a student
+both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle.  Schopenhauer's proud injunction,
+indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare
+himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine
+wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher
+teaching of Wagner, and--though in a less degree--of Carlyle.
+
+[9] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative
+rather than on artistic sympathy.  The Russian indeed never quite
+understood Flaubert's "rage for the word."  Yet the deep inner concord
+of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence.  It was the
+supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet
+was the friendship of his earlier years.  Yet they met seldom, and
+their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as
+described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after
+some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening
+would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht,
+Alfred."  It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the
+dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is
+darkly shadowed.  The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive
+to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of
+travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of
+its unending rest.
+
+[10] Cf. Philostratus, _Life of Appollonius_.  I. 28.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the _Daily
+News_ Special Number for December 31st, 1900.  In it he presents a
+survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during
+the nineteenth century.  He outlines the development of the New German
+Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and
+Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of
+Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present
+death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe.  The future
+_roles_ of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the
+author.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
+
+I
+
+DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
+
+In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody close, and the fury
+of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a
+time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as
+now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the
+determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half
+regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once
+fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then,
+as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question
+whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century,
+pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny
+there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally
+arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that
+the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half
+its course to the Mohammedan.  Yet in one deep enough matter the mood
+of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe
+of 1900.  Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation
+between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise
+moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in
+1800 was radiantly clear to all men--the glory and the wonder, the
+endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century
+and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity.  The
+desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was
+in sight.  The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, "Bliss was it in
+that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine
+was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:
+
+  Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,
+  Durch des Himmels praecht'gen Plan,
+  Wandelt, Brueder, eure Bahn,
+  Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,
+
+and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of
+victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired
+of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of
+Poland, and the Russian steppes.  Since those days three generations
+have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and passed to their rest,
+and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century
+and the long vista of its years!  Man presents himself no more as he
+was delineated by the poets of 1800.  Not now does man appear to the
+poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like
+some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted
+minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself
+like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink
+of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of
+the worlds.  From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the
+great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe?  Whither are
+vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened?  Is it final
+despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary
+eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit
+of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring,
+wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789,
+of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?
+
+In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit
+valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in
+every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and
+personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable.  That word was
+"Freedom"--freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the
+thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of
+principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the
+negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating;
+freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of
+Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman;
+to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom
+to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic
+injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs
+of the elder centuries!  A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,
+that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and
+sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself
+to the world.  But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived
+in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest
+this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol
+and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream.  Therefore, he spoke
+the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,
+straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or
+boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte."  Since the death of Mohammed,
+no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and
+aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.
+Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the
+first year of the century dedicates to him his _Genie du
+Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Heloise_, most
+deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.
+And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name
+"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest
+achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the
+Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired.  In that year, at Weimar,
+Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been
+in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the
+disdain of the greater poet.  Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even
+then the spell of Napoleon's name.  And in that year, the greatest of
+English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,
+with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,
+the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's
+allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in
+Europe and in the world.  To the calmer devotion of genius was added
+the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.
+And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself
+capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an
+energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the
+prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of
+Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an
+imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from
+a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own
+heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all
+around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the
+Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his
+youth upwards.  Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and
+Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly
+gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of
+his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.
+If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the
+victor, it was but for a moment.  In the universal horror and joy with
+which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure
+of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men
+felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up
+inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new
+world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.
+
+The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive
+transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched.  In the gradual
+declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the
+warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word
+travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or
+solicitude which marks the closing years of the century.  The first
+disillusionment came swiftly.  Fifteen years pass, years of war and
+convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth
+century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those
+fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the
+aspirations of men!  The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor
+Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race.  France, the
+world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the
+armies of Europe, risen in arms against her!  Emperors and kings,
+nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers
+like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Koerner, warriors like Kutusov,
+Bluecher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments
+of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities
+and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in
+this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and
+one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!
+
+What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon?  What marvel
+that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other
+of modern ages.  Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France
+false to the Revolution.  Man's action at its highest is, like his art,
+symbolic.  To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of
+a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall
+of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty.  To the Europe
+of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the
+princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into
+the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille
+to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,
+injustice and tyranny.  And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,
+the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the
+tyrants the hosts of the free.  What were his own despotisms, his own
+rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the
+_guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary
+war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the
+necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and
+felicity of the centuries to come?  Napoleon at the height of Imperial
+power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions
+unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.
+"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred
+years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can
+now be trusted to their own guidance."  The hour of his death, whether
+by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the
+hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart.  That hour of
+penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into
+the silence and the darkness.  Napoleon, trusting to the word and to
+the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed
+star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels.  But at the outset he
+has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits
+of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,
+its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats.  Yet it is
+in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of
+Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful
+resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland.  Then, turning to the
+West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,
+and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,
+and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end
+there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination.  The
+Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed
+suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against
+its liberators!  But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,
+calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of
+Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian
+Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe
+against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.
+
+Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most
+ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants
+of Francis II or Frederick William III.  At Vienna the gaily-plumaged
+diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of
+unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the
+most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the
+fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the
+Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the
+lingering anguish of Prometheus.  And if not one man of supreme genius
+then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of
+that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made
+themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what
+two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their
+hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no
+more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;
+that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can
+never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
+
+The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the
+abdication at the Elysee is a conflict between the two principles of
+Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for
+constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and
+the watchword of Humanity.  In theory the divine right of peoples was
+arrayed against the divine right of kings.  The conflict was waged
+bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle.  The dungeon, the
+torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or
+Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the
+weapons of the tyrants.  The secret society, the Marianne, the
+Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or
+transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,
+Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to
+Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon.  And in
+this singular conflict, what leaders!  In Spain, the heroic Juan
+Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Goerres, the morning-star of
+political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and
+the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause.  It was
+not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the
+possibility of united action.  Opposed to these were the united
+purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression
+of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the
+great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller
+principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,
+Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena.  To this war against Liberty the Czar
+Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Kruedener's phrase, had
+struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity
+of a crusade.  From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of
+the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel
+the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous
+despotism.
+
+In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the
+place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.
+"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to
+be the enemy of the Revolution."  Nature, indeed, and the environment
+of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.
+Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a
+heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high
+with any generous impulse.  He was hostile to nobility of thought,
+action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a
+living satire upon himself, his life, his aims.  He despised history,
+for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.
+But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,
+and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a
+thoughtful mind.  Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and
+interminable _billets-doux_ written between sentences of death, exile,
+the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip
+II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding
+the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and
+espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western
+world.  There was nothing in him that was great.  But he was
+indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years.  Nesselrode,
+Hardenberg, Talleyrand even--whose Memoirs seem the work of genius
+beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's--found their
+designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy.  Congress
+after Congress--Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona--exhibited
+his triumph to Europe.  At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to
+the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the
+Empire, was dictated by Metternich--"Hold fast by what is old, for that
+alone is good.  If our forefathers found in this the true path, why
+should we seek another?  New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles
+which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.
+Beware of such ideas!  It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of
+loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal
+subjects to me.  See that you fulfil this task!"  Is there in human
+history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom
+or foresight of him who penned it?  It were an insult to the great
+Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian.  Yet they
+succeeded.  The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity
+was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times
+had not yet arisen.  Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire
+lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain?  Has all the blood from
+Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain?  Hard
+on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe
+the message that Napoleon was dead.  "It is not an event," said
+Talleyrand, "but a piece of news."  The remark was just.  Europe seemed
+now one vast Sainte Helene, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all
+hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished.  The solitary grave at
+Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a
+cause for ever lost.
+
+The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance.  Heine's
+letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three
+Days awakened.  "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Marseillaise_!" he
+writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"
+reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize
+again the sacred weapons.  Bring flowers!  I will crown my head for the
+fight of death.  Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,
+words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and
+illumine the cabins of the poor."  But when Lafayette presented to
+France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton
+umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
+Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when
+Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the
+struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.
+France herself was weary of the illusion.  "We had need of a sword," a
+Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears."  The taunt was as
+foolish as it was unjust.  France assuredly had done her part in the
+war for Liberty.  The hour had come for the States of Europe to work
+out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,
+a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,
+and Metternich.
+
+Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more
+limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of
+the world.  Other despots died--Alexander I in 1825, the two
+Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and
+Frederick William III in 1840.  Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,
+Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on--"the gods," as
+Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."
+The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric
+he had reared.  From Guizot and his master he found but little
+resistance.  The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian
+system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little
+resistance as the France of Guizot.  Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion
+of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of
+his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of
+Europe than the march of an army.
+
+
+
+II
+
+NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
+
+In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is
+endless and unresting.  The moment of collision between an old and a
+new principle of human action is a revolution.  Such a turning-point is
+the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848.  Two
+forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet
+indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed
+to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the
+principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under
+various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces
+of the present age.  The freedom of the nation was the form into which
+the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled.  Saint-Simonianism
+preserved for a time the old tradition.  But the devotees of
+Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after
+anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of
+Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,
+and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,
+but for France, for Germany, or for Italy.  Patriotism was taking the
+place of Humanism.
+
+To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism
+throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the
+astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the
+Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the
+Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all
+Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of
+the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or
+even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792.  Louis Napoleon,
+entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put
+it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason
+of Gorgei, the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy
+imaginings.  Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the
+change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the
+_Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_.  For the principle of
+Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the
+second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German
+Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more
+potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden
+unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century.
+It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave
+the volumes of Palacky's _History of Bohemia_ a power like that of a
+war-song.  Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of
+Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its
+course in Hungary to a glorious close--the Magyar nation.  Even in
+Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of
+Pan-Slavism, which the war of 1878--the Schipka Pass, Plevna, the
+dazzling heroism of Skobeleff--has made memorable.  In the triumph of
+this same principle lies the future hope of Spain.  Spain has been
+exhausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist intrigue, by the
+arrogance of successive dictators, and by the bloody reprisals of
+faction; she has lost the last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso
+XIII fate seems to reserve the task of completing again by mutual
+resignation that union with Portugal of which Castelar indicated the
+basis--a common blood and language, the common graves which are their
+ancient battle-fields, and the common wars against the Moslem, which
+are their glory.
+
+With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great
+principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of
+the European stage.  This is the principle whose votaries confronted
+Lamartine at the Hotel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.
+The famous sentence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its
+touch of sentimentality marking the distinction between September,
+1792, and February, 1848, "The tricolour has made the tour of the
+world; the red flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been turned
+into derision by subsequent events.  The red flag has made the tour of
+the world as effectively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte.
+The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism--for all four,
+however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue,
+spring from a common root--have been variously ascribed in France to
+the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels,
+Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which
+arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the
+broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.
+But the principle which informs alike the writings of individual
+thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar force in the first
+half of the century from the doctrines and teachings of Fichte and
+Schleiermacher, is but the principle to which in all ages suffering and
+wrong have made their vain appeal--the responsibility of all for the
+misery of the many and the enduring tyranny of the few.  Indignant at
+the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia applies his destructive
+criticism to all institutions, civil, religious, political, and finding
+all hollow, seeks to overwhelm all in one common ruin.  The
+Emancipation of 1861 was to the Nihilist but the act of Tyranny veiling
+itself as Justice.  It left the serf, brutalized by centuries of
+oppression, even more completely than before to the mercy of the boyard
+and the exploiters of human souls.  Michel Bakounine, Kropotkine,
+Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the
+signal to the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisations of
+Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and for a time, indeed,
+Bazaroffism was in literary jargon the equivalent of Nihilism.  If at
+intervals in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at some new
+crime, attempted or successful, of Anarchy, if Europe notes the
+singular regularity with which the crime is traced to Italy, and is
+perplexed at the absence of all the usual characteristics of conspiracy
+against society--for what known motives of human action, vanity or
+fear, hope or the gratification of revenge, can explain the silence of
+the confederates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the agents of
+his will?--if Europe is perplexed at this apparition of a terror
+unknown to the ancient world, the Italian sees in it but the operation
+of the law of responsibility.  To the nameless sufferings of Italy he
+ascribes the temper which leads to the mania of the anarchist; and the
+sufferings of Italy in their morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal
+of Italy by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and supremely in
+1856.  As Europe has grown more conscious of its essential unity as one
+State system, diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as the
+Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic appeal to the equality
+of kings, to the derisive theory of the Concert of Europe.  But
+Communism and Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of Europe
+more convincing and more terrible, and full of sinister presage to the
+future.
+
+A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Socialism.  Karl Marx may be
+regarded as the chief exponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or
+international Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual founder of the
+national or Democratic Socialism of Germany.  Marx, whose countenance
+with its curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velasquez,
+Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out as the apostle and avenger
+of human degradation and human suffering, published the first sketch of
+his principles in 1847, but more completely in the manifesto adopted by
+the Paris Commune in 1849.  As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced
+to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in
+wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau _pere_, so the
+new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has
+its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new
+aristocracy, the _bourgeoisie_.  Factory owners and millionaires have
+taken the place of the _noblesse_ of last century.  And the sufferings
+of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with
+their numbers.  Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires.
+Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own
+wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by
+which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of
+their own despair.
+
+Marx's greatest work, _Das Kapital_, published in 1867, was to the new
+revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the _Contrat Social_
+of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89.  The brilliant genius of
+Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and
+ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature
+of Marx was repelled by these principles.  It was this trait in his
+writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul and his faith in the
+Prussian peasant and the Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time
+the interest of Bismarck.  Even a State such as Austria Lassalle
+regarded as higher than any federal union whatever.  The image of
+Lassalle's character, his philosophy, and too swift career, may be
+found in his earliest work, _Heracleitus_, the god-gifted statesman
+whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, but realizing his life in
+that of others, toiling ceaselessly for the oppressed, the dumb,
+helpless, leaderless masses who suffer silently, yet know not why they
+suffer.  A monarchy resting upon the support of the artisan-myriads
+against the arrogance of the _bourgeois_, as the Tudor monarchy rested
+upon the support of the yeomen and the towns against the arrogance of
+the feudal barons--this, in the most effective period of his career,
+was Lassalle's ideal State.  And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply
+to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly been
+characterized as the charter of the whole movement of democratic
+socialism in Germany down to the present hour.
+
+The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European Liberalism a more
+formidable adversary than Metternich.  The youth of Nicholas I had been
+formed by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the Czar
+Alexander.  The Princess Lieven and his mother, Maria Federovna, the
+friend of Stein, and the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in him
+a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and unwearied.  A resolute will,
+dauntless courage, a love of the beautiful in nature and in art, a
+high-souled enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the
+fate-appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies.  The Teuton in
+his blood effaced the Slav, and the fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of
+one sole purpose gives his career something of the tragic unity of
+Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of the Russian
+autocrat.  One God, one law, one Church, one State, Russian in
+language, Russian in creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of
+its civic, military, and municipal life--this was the dream to the
+realization of which the thirty crowded years of his reign were
+consecrated.  There is grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the
+manner in which he encounters and quells the insurrection of the 26th
+December.  Then, true to the immemorial example of tyrants, he found
+employment for sedition in war.  He tore from Persia in a single
+campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 20,000,000 roubles.
+The mystic Liberalism of Alexander was abandoned.  The free
+constitution of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old Russian
+party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as distinct from a German, policy
+was welcomed with surprise and tumultuous delight.  "Despotism," he
+declared, "is the principle of my government; my people desires no
+other."  Yet he endeavoured to win young Russia by flattery, as he had
+conquered old Russia by reaction.  He encouraged the movement in poetry
+against the tasteless imitation of Western models, and in society
+against the dominance of the French language.  In the first years of
+his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary expression, and
+Russian prose and Russian verse acquire their own cadences.  Yet
+liberty is the life-blood of art; and liberty he could not grant.  The
+freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of speech forbidden, and
+a strict censorship, exercised by the dullest of officials, stifled
+literature.  "How unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked when
+Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of his dungeon, "all his
+prisoners die on his hands."  How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas!
+All his men of genius died by violent deaths.  Lermontoff and Poushkine
+fell in duels before antagonists who represented the _tchinovnik_
+class.  Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiedov was assassinated at
+Teheran.
+
+His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great--the
+restoration of the Byzantine Empire.  Making admirable use of the
+Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at
+Navarino.  Thus popular at home and abroad, regarded by the Liberals of
+Europe as the restorer of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a
+stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to crush the Poles.
+Enthusiastic Berlin students carried the effigies of Polish leaders in
+triumph; but not a sword was drawn.  England, France, Austria looked on
+silent at the work of Diebitch and Paskievitch, "my two mastiffs," as
+the Czar styled them, and the true "_finis Poloniae_" had come.  A
+Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the
+extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot.  Yet his
+European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his
+crowning chance--the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes
+represented Liberty and the Revolution.  Every force that personal
+rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that
+reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the
+efforts of the monarch in this enterprise.  The disaster was sudden,
+overwhelming, irremediable.  Yet in one thing his life was a success,
+and that a great one--he had Russianised Russia.
+
+The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only
+less significant than the Revolution of 1848.  The isolating force of
+religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East
+upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy.  The hopes of the
+Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria,
+deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the
+Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed
+Hungary.  From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour
+seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his
+name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time.
+The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the
+designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were
+checked.  Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz
+and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor
+Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy.  Thirty years have passed since
+the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices
+which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a
+conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens
+which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and
+after Rossbach.  But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa;
+instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who
+make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious
+peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the
+past.  This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in
+disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but
+there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength
+made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and
+example of a single man--Giuseppe Mazzini.  To modern Republicanism,
+not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a
+watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world.  Equal rights
+mean equal duties.  The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man.  He
+taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not
+in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of
+those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the
+path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by
+side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by
+establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.
+
+The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation
+against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520.
+The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in
+efforts to invent a constitution like that of England.  It was the
+happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of
+1688 and the pupils of Sieyes.  Heine's bitter address to Germany,
+"Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which
+every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Wuertemberger, or Rheinlander
+felt not less deeply.  The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the
+barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but
+it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper
+perception of the aspiration of all Germany.  Which of the multifarious
+kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or
+imperial?  Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her
+tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been
+the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn.  The Danubian
+principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the
+future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost.  Prussia
+alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Bluecher,
+of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was
+essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope
+of religious tolerance.  After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue
+north of the Alps was inevitable.  The question was how and in what
+shape the end would realize itself.  Montesquieu insists that, even
+without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment
+of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate.  Yet, with data
+before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire
+without Bismarck.  His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through
+the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary
+period.  His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose
+of Frederick William IV.  His diplomacy led to Koeniggraetz, and the
+manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a
+call to battle.  And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian
+legions in the field.  From his first definite entry into a State
+career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and
+simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour
+of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian.  From the Hohenzollern he looked
+for no gratitude.  His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the
+individual.  He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the
+value of the word of a King.  False or true to all men else, he was
+unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to
+himself, true to God.  He could not bequeath his secret to those who
+came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to
+Luini.  But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance.  It
+possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a
+common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph.
+Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to
+Bavaria.  Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War,
+Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing
+ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan.  The new Empire, whether it be to Europe
+a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against
+Ultramontanism.
+
+The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian
+alliance.  Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann.
+Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the
+alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century
+began?  It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled
+Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power
+can avert.  Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long,
+terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole
+Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder.  No man's home is a
+home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the
+'_Drang nach Osten_' turned back for ever."
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
+
+In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or
+accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion.  The nineteenth
+century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the
+overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been
+characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry.
+Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the
+imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his
+intelligence, has had in this age its adherents.  The Papacy in each
+successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude.
+Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to
+escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence
+and the perfection of Nature.  Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like
+musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the
+world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch
+to his doom.  Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and
+the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by
+the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the
+thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French
+_litterateurs_.  The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this
+movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the
+Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and
+Chateaubriand.  Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of
+Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme
+literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.
+Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the
+war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its
+forms.  Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded
+beyond imagination's wing.  Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the
+infinite solitudes of space.  The theory of evolution stirred the
+common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till
+then to the studious calm of the few.  The ardour to know all, to be
+all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century
+had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty
+of man, and surprise has followed surprise.  The aspirations of the
+Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its
+sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle
+Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased
+facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living
+impulse.  As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,
+and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower
+of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one.  The bounds
+of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and
+surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the
+Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the
+soul.
+
+That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the
+nineteenth century from preceding  centuries--the  gradually
+increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has
+strengthened this impression.  An age mystic in its religion, symbolic
+in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an
+age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.
+Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of
+thrones, turned to the East and found peace.  What were the armies of
+Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Hafiz and Sadi, and to the
+calm of the trackless centuries far behind?  The mood of Goethe has
+become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of
+the century's end.  The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole
+position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany.
+The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as
+vividly as the oldest, Italy and France.  It controls the meditative
+depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's
+dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert.  It informs the teaching of
+Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky.  Goethe, at the beginning
+of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of
+Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has
+woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the
+Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a
+rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of
+Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the
+Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of
+painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
+
+What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze!  The ideal of
+Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins
+Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some
+profounder mystery, some mightier destiny.  More than any race known to
+history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other
+thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his
+own spirit.  The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of
+Wagner attest this.  Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,
+of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.
+Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably.  But the purple
+fringe of another dawn is on the horizon.  Teutonic heroism and
+resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the
+ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty
+calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of
+men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends.  What vistas
+arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this
+union!  The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an
+accomplished hope clearly defined.  The last sun of the dying century
+goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an
+ideal it but darkly discerns.
+
+
+
+
+
+GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.
+
+
+
+
+
+Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.
+
+
+  TREITSCHKE          BERNHARDI
+  EXPOUNDED           EXPLAINED
+
+
+GERMANY AND ENGLAND
+
+By Professor Cramb.
+
+With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction by the Hon. Joseph
+Choate.
+
+LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the
+present crisis will read this book.  There are in it things which will
+cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to
+the war so clearly set forth."
+
+MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its
+clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its
+broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the
+occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."
+
+The _Times_ says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with
+all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly
+grateful."
+
+The _Spectator_ says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for
+themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the
+German Imperialism.  They will learn in the smallest possible space
+what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."
+
+
+
+
+Three Important Works
+
+
+THE GERMAN WAR BOOK
+
+Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of
+the German Army.
+
+Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H.  MORGAN, M.A.
+
+Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late
+Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct
+and its Legal Results."
+
+_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
+
+This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General
+Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the
+conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies,
+neutrals, hostages.  Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.
+
+
+FRANCE IN DANGER
+
+By PAUL VERGNET.  Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.
+
+_Crown 8vo.  2s. 6d. net._
+
+Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what
+Professor Cramb did for England.  After a careful study of the
+Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his
+countrymen that War was imminent.  His aspect of the question has never
+been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought
+to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great
+War.
+
+
+WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS
+
+Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency
+legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the
+Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War
+on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on
+Commercial Relations.
+
+By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.
+
+_Crown 8vo._
+
+
+IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR
+
+A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES
+
+By E. B. MITCHELL.
+
+_With Map.  Crown 8vo._
+
+This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of
+things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14,
+at the end of the great rush.  The writer, who is neither a summer
+visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant,
+had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city
+and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is
+neither all gloom nor all brightness.  At the present time, when the
+War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a
+disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and
+timely.
+
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial
+Britain, by J. A. Cramb
+
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