Page:The empire and the century.djvu/45

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14
THE IMPERIAL IDEAL

concerned—the British Empire. From the time of the Crusades, or, if you choose to regard the Crusades as religious rather than political in their significance, from the time of Henry the Navigator, Europe has, from small beginnings and, at first, by tentative steps, been overrunning the world: she has been stretching out her hands over the remainder of the globe, and been drawing it under her control or within the orbit of her civilization. In some cases, of which the United States is at once the typical and the most splendid instance, she has planted new nationalities of European origin in what were once waste or thinly-peopled regions of the earth. In others, as in the case of the Russian Empire, she has extended an existing European nationality far beyond the bounds of Europe, In one recent and memorable instance she has, by her influence and example, quickened into vigorous life an old but almost dormant nationality that had long remained stagnant on a lower plane of civilization. Yet, again—and here India is the typical and crowning illustration—where no question of nationality was involved or could for ages arise, she has reduced to a condition of independence an immense population incapable of providing a civilized Government for itself; has established the reign of justice and order, which is the first condition of progress in civilization; supplied the initiative and momentum that could not be found among the governed; and entered on the tremendous task of raising them to her own plane of civilization by an effort which, to be successful, must last for ages.

Now, it might seem that the great change which has come over men's thoughts in the present generation, and which was alluded to in the opening sentences of this paper—the change that was there summed up in the phrase 'the national ideal has given place to the Imperial'-is nothing more than the transference to the movement of expansion of the political interest and attention that had previously been concentrated on the movement of national reorganization. It is that in a