"IT CHAPTER I GREECE T is humiliating and depressing to be a citizen of a small nation; it is exalting and satisfying to be the subject of a great Empire." This statement, which is attributed to a distinguished soldier, is partly true and partly erroneous. Imperialism, whether in religion or in nationalism, is an exalted and an exalting conception. "Pax Britannica" is a lariat that attracts, holds, encircles, and consolidates. While it safeguards personal and domestic liberty, and fosters native or racial aspirations, it creates a sympathetic imagination which forms the basis of all federated and co-ordinated action. Our secular, and even religious education, needs a larger touch of Imperial colouring. To permeate nationalism with Imperialism is both the difficulty and the duty of the hour. It is the question that looms on the horizon of Britain. We have suffered from the limitations of provincialism on the one hand, and of nationalism on the other. We need a greater interchange of thought, of interest, and of the sense of separate and collective responsibility among all the component parts. Imperialism has both a political and a religious significance, but it does not necessarily mean extended culture, a deeper life, or a more solid existence. On the contrary, as history teaches, it may symbolise an ambition partly selfish, partly commercial, and partly buccaneering, immoral in its operation and injurious in its effect on the mind and temper of the nation that prosecutes it. We have an illustration of this type of Imperialism in the piratical enterprises under Drake and Raleigh in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and in the Russian Empire, which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe had combined to check. In the age of Elizabeth we behold a wild scramble for transatlantic empires through the discovery of the wealth of South America and the West Indies, when natives were enslaved and moral considerations were regarded as foolish sentiments. There is another type of Imperialism less grossly material in its outlook, purer in its motive, and nobler in its ambition; an Imperialism waged in the defence of the oppressed, for the dissemination of knowledge, the extension of liberty, and the advancement of civilisation. Such, broadly speaking, has been the effect of British Imperialism both in Colonial and Oriental regions. It may not have been always well expressed, and it may at times have been influenced by unreasonable jealousy and fear of distant competitors. We cannot justify all that has been done in the name of progress, liberty, and humanity, even by British statesmen, soldiers, and reformers; but when British Imperial expansion is judged by areas and epochs sufficiently wide and typical, we cannot dispute the fact that it has added enormously, not only to the wealth of the world, but to the general sum of human intelligence, freedom, and happiness. Modern British Imperialism is the only Imperialism that has risen above the mere commercial conception of a nation's mission and obligation. Britain has not gone forth to conquer and to annex that she might subjugate, enslave, and oppress, but that she might commercialise, civilise, and autonomise. Britain governs that she may develop latent human forces, without regard to race or religion. She teaches her dependencies the elements of freedom, and trains them in the art of self-government, not merely by right of control, but by educational, commercial, and spiritual quickening. To be a citizen of such an Empire, which comprises one-fourth of the population of the globe and one-fifth of the surface of the earth, should be regarded as among the most exalted of human privileges. But there are non-Imperialistic nations, small in number and poor in material resources, that have their golden memories in the annals of history. In war, commerce, or politics, they do not count for much, but when we enter the region of art, literature, and philosophy, or the region of the emotion, of creative intelligence, and particularly of religion, the influence exercised by them fills an important page in human history. What is true of the smaller, is likewise true of the more obscure nations that cannot lay claim to such qualities as distinguish civilised communities, but which have, nevertheless, indirectly contributed to the common stock. The higher races cannot touch the lower without being influenced by their ideals, religious rites, and even superstitions. Did not the Norsemen learn magic from the Lapps? Did not the Jews of the ancient world implant the idea of the one true God in the moral consciousness of mankind? The influence a people exert cannot be measured by its number, or its reputation. European historians have given but little thought to the Icelanders of the modern world. Outside Scandinavia nothing practically is known of their antecedents, moralities, mentality, and progress. They have never numbered more than about seventy thousand, and for more than a thousand years have they been separated from the rest of the world by glaciers, volcanoes, and an inhospitable ocean, but they have produced a literature superior in literary quality to that of the Celts or Continental Teutons. Take that once brilliant race, the Greeks. Athens and Attica put together had not more than half a million inhabitants, a large proportion of whom were slaves, but the Greeks have an immense tradition-artistic, literary, and historical. The number of volumes which tell of Greece is superior to the number of its inhabitants under Pericles; a more gifted nation never existed. It is far back in the dim centuries, at a time when such knowledge as lies beyond the bounds of actual experience was limited in its scope and character, yet, what Imperial nation is there that can boast of an intellect more solid, or powerful?—an intellect that developed thinking, judgment, insight, memory, taste, will, and imagination; setting the human mind well on the road to freedom-the greatest and the highest of all derived qualities. any logicians who overshadow Aristotle? added to his disquisitions on rhetoric? logic still stands where he placed it. surpass him in the art of dialectical argument. In political Has Britain produced Formal deductive |