To treat in a non-partisan spirit of the most burning of all present-day public questions in the pages of a nonpolitical magazine is to execute an egg dance of no common difficulty. The war in South Africa is not yet over; perhaps the end is not yet in sight. The controversy over the events which caused the precipitation of hostilities is being waged as fiercely as ever. The names of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Kruger evoke as passionate demonstrations as they did six months ago. The mere idea of a "pro-Boer" meeting still suggests the possibility-which, indeed, ought not to have been forgotten by any reader of previous passionate episodes in British history-that free hissing is not necessarily opposed to, but is rather a phase of, free speech. The author of "The Areopagitica" was the greatest champion of freedom of speech that the world has produced, but being also the greatest of pamphleteers, he claimed and exercised to the full his right to hiss, groan and cat-call his chief opponents, such as Salmasius, out of existence.

But we have reached a period in the South African struggle when we can think of, and even have glimpses of, the divinity that has been shaping our ends, regardless of our rough-hewing. The stage of self-preservation has passed; the stage of philosophic and deliberate "settlement" will ere long be entered upon. We can now stand

erect on the summit of the South African kopje without any apprehension of a rain of bullets from Boer political Mausers; we can, from it, as from a Pisgah, survey the Promised Land. For "we are all Imperialists now," much more truly than, according to Sir William Harcourt, "we are all Socialists now."

The differences between "Liberal Imperialism," "Sane Imperialism," "Common-Sense Imperialism" and "Jingo Imperialism" may not be quite unreal or academic. If they savor of hairsplitting, they tend also to party-splitting. But Imperialism transcends our political distinctions and distractions. It is an idea, a passion, a worship, a fascinating siren, such as inspired that poet who surpassed even Keats in his sensitiveness to Beauty:

Ligeia! Ligeia!

My beautiful one, Whose harshest idea Will to melody run.

When we think of the uprising of the British nation after that black week which witnessed the disasters-as they then seemed-of Magersfontein, Stormberg and the Tugela, and when we look at the rush of Australians and Canadians to meet, live and even die together on the South African veldt, we cannot help feeling dimly conscious that we are in the presence of one of those gregarious ideas through whose dominance death is swallowed up of victory, that caused the best blood in Europe to be spent in the Crusades, and sent the best brains in England to seek Empire and plunder on the Spanish Main.

Like everything else which has stimulated men and altered the careers of nations, Imperialism has its feet of clay as well as its head of gold. Like Cromwell, whose worship it has served in such a remarkable manner to revive, it is a compound of realism and mysticism. It is the function of literature, according to that great critic whose place, now that he has "passed, not softly but swiftly, into the silent land," has not been filled, to apply ideas to

Mr.

Imperialism, by whatever adjective, such as "Sane" or "Common-sense," it may be qualified, involves attachment to, or faith in, the British Empire. What, in turn, is the British Empire? In this case fas est ab hoste doceri. Goldwin Smith is well known as a very able man and a very diligent student of British-perhaps it might be more accurate to say English-history, but he is the last man to be accused of "Jingoism." He is a Unionist, but Lord Beaconsfield once styled him "a wild professor." So little of an advocate of Imperialism or Expansion, in the limited or specially British sense, has he been, that he has persistently advocated the annexation to the United States of Canada, which has been his second home. In his latest work, "The United Kingdom," he thus pronounces upon Imperialism as an historical fact:

The British Empire embraces at this day, besides the thirty-nine millions of people in the two islands, three hundred millions in India and twenty millions, more or less, in colonies scattered over the globe. Instead of being sea-girt, England has an open land frontier of four thousand miles, allowing for indentation, in North America, besides the whole northern frontier of Hindostan. To hold this empire she has to maintain a fleet, not only for her own defence and that of her trade, but for her command of all the seas. An empire this vast aggregate of miscellaneous possessions is called. Το

part of them the name is misapplied, and the misapplication may lead to practical error. Empire is absolute rule, whether the imperial power be a monarchy, like the Persian or the Spanish; an aristocracy, like the Roman or the Venetian; or a commonwealth, like Athens of old and Great Britain at the present day. In the case of the British possessions, the name is properly applicable only to the Indian empire, the Crown colonies, and fortresses or naval stations such as Gibraltar and Malta. It is not properly applicable to selfgoverning colonies such as Canada, Australia and the Cape, which, though nominally dependent, are in reality independent; do not obey British law; do not contribute to British armaments; and are at liberty even to wage commercial war against the mother-country by levying protective duties on her goods. The word "colony," too, is used in a misleading sense, as if it were synonymous with dependent, or were limited to colonies retaining their political connection with the mothercountry. The colonies of England which now form the United States did not cease, on becoming independent,

to be English colonies. In the feudal notion of personal fealty, which led the colonist to think that even at the ends of the earth he remained indefeasibly the liegeman of the British King, combined, perhaps, with the notion, also feudal, of the crown as supreme landowner, we probably see the account of the political tie between the British colonies and the British crown. The Mayflower exiles, in their compact before landing, described themselves as loyal subjects of King James, who had undertaken, for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and the honor of their King and country, to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia. Had the exiles of the Mayflower been citizens of a Greek republic, they would have taken the sacred fire from the hearth of the mother city and gone forth to found a new commonwealth for themselves, owning no relation to its parent but that of filial respect and affection.

This passage is of value because it demonstrates not only what Imperialism-in so far as it involves attachment to the British Empire-certainly is not in the sense of historical fact, and what it vaguely is in the sense of historical sentiment. It is not absolute rule in the strict and only proper meaning of the phrase the meaning in which we speak of the Roman Empire of the past and of the Russian Empire of to-day. Mr. Smith says that in the case of the British possessions "the name is properly applicable only to the Indian Empire, the Crown Colonies and fortresses or naval stations such as Gibraltar or Malta." Fortresses may be left out of consideration. They are under military government and exist for military reasons. But the British rule of the Crown Colonies, of India-and it may, for the sake of argument, be added of Egypt-is characterized by a different Imperialism from the Roman or the Russian. It means government, not for the sake of fortune to individuals, or even of glory to the nation, but for the sake of civilization-in other words, for the diffusion of peace and justice over regions where these blessings have hitherto been unknown. Unless we demean ourselves in India, in Egypt, and, as the result will, no doubt, show, in South Africa, as if we were the trustees of civilization, we shall have failed to accomplish our professed mission and to be unequal to bearing "The White Man's Burthen" with dignity and moral profit. Unless, indeed, Imperialism is an essentially noble idealit may be imperfectly understood here, still more imperfectly practised thereit will fail. In the meantime, it is an attempt to give harmony, and, if one may say so, in such a connection, the heartiness of a chorus to the otherwise differing sentiments that animate the collocation of self-governing States, Crown Colonies and ancient Empires over which the British flag flies. Mr.

Goldwin Smith has shown how the sentiment of feudalism, of personal fealty, animated the Mayflower settlers when they established themselves on the North American continent. That was quite compatible with the sturdy maintenance of rights and privileges; so, indeed, the quarrel which ended in the establishment of the independence of the United States was to prove. There never was a greater Imperialist, even in the modern sense, than Chatham; and it may, therefore, safely be assumed that he would not, in that memorable last speech of his, have defended the "schismatic" action of the colonists had he not been certain that their vindication of their "rights" was not quite compatible with loyalty to the central Mayflower idea.

That the New England idea is very different from that usually associated with the phrase, "Little England," is now, indeed, almost startlingly manifest. The United States, left to themselves, and with ample facilities for "expansion" afforded by the size of the continent on which they are the most considerable Power, have developed an Imperialism of their own, and one which has, on the surface, but a remote connection with the Monroe doctrine. And in considering the literary inspiration of Imperialism generally, we cannot do better than take an American illustration. Walt Whitman lived and wrote before the recent war betwen the United States and Spain, and the consequent appearance of his beloved Republic among the WorldPowers interested in the Far Eastern problem, with the almost innumerable complications which that involves. That even before then there prevailed a passion for American unity equivalent to that similar passion which here we call Imperialism, the following passage shows:

The highest separate personality of these States will only be fully coherent,

grand and free, through the cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate the Union. This is what makes the importance to the identities of these States of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union-a moral and spiritual idea subjecting all the parts with remorseless power. What needs most fostering through the hundred years to come, in all parts of the United States-North, South, Mississippi Valley and Atlantic and Pacific Coasts-is this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, whatever the place, with the idea and fact of American totality, and with what is meant by the flag, the stars, the stripes. We need this conviction of nationality as a faith to be absorbed in the blood and belief of the people everywhere-South, North, West, East-to emanate in their life and in native literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America, inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future, of humanity. Judging from history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas proper to them (and such ideas only) that have made the profoundest glory and endurance of nations in the past.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling is commonly regarded as the Tyrtæus of Imperialism, and the influence of his writings in the way both of fostering the passion of Imperialism and of expressing its moods will be dealt with later on. But here we have an American of the Americans, a democrat of the democrats, the latter-day poet of "liberty, fraternity and equality," who, lacking in humor otherwise he might have been the trans-Atlantic Burns-has carried the doctrine of "the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of woman" to the verge of farce, giving expresion to what we on this side of the Atlantic call the Imperial sentiment with that poetical ardor which can only be explained by sincerity. This "fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, whatever the place, with the idea and fact of Amer

ican totality, and what is meant by the flag," this "moral and spiritual idea subjecting all the parts with remorseless power," certainly holds of the United Kingdom as fully and as absolutely as of the United States. It may be doubted if even yet Imperialism as "a moral and spiritual idea subjecting all the parts of the Empire with remorseless power" is thoroughly understood by the poets who sing or the politicians who practise it. That must be effected before it can be "absorbed in the blood and belief of the people everywhere." Meanwhile, a sufficiently wonderful feat has been accomplished. An idea has been found for which the same enthusiastic loyalty can be manifested as was evoked by the older political watchwords-by the Throne, by the Dynasty, by "Our glorious Constitution." And the romantic fascination of the idea has been heightened by the fact that the Queen who, in the earlier years of her reign, showed herself equal to the task of embodying, as it had never been embodied before, the doctrine of limited monarchy-"the crowned Republic's crowning commonsense"-should, in what must necessarily be the latest period of her reign, have shown herself not less equal to the task of indicating the practical meaning of Imperialism.

That Imperialism should become a force-in some respects the prominent force in our literature, was as "inevitable" as the war in South Africa itself. At the present moment we are not specially concerned with the nonliterary "con-causes" of Imperialism, except to the extent that literature is, or ought to be, the application of all ideas to life. That Imperialism is allied to, and has been fostered by the recent British delight in athleticism,' is as certain as that it is a passionate and yet philosophic protest for nationalism as a force in the life of the world against Internationalism, especially in

On

the destructive forms of Socialism and Nihilism. But, looking to Victorian literature, and the great names which were all-influential in those decades of it which are quite familiar to middleaged men, it is really one of the most easily explicable of phenomena. the moral side it is a protest against the merely materialistic view of lifethe notion that a man is to be valued, not according to the good that is done through his influence while he lives, but by the amount of wealth he leaves behind him. However much "the simple, great ones gone" of the Victorian era may have differed from each other -Carlyle from Arnold, Ruskin from Swinburne, Clough from Browningthey have agreed in holding up to scorn and reprobation that materialistic conception of happiness, which has naturally obtained great importance in a reign so remarkable for its fat years of prosperity as that of the present sovereign.

But Imperialism goes back further than the Victorian era, to the time when Byron captivated Europe, even although he was boycotted in Great Britain, with "the pageant of his bleeding heart." His romantic heroes, and still more romantic villains, his Corsairs and his Laras, dashed their heads as gallantly and as ineffectually against their prison walls of conventional Philistine sentiment as he did himself. But the strength of Byronism, apart from the views on special things with which it will be associated, lies in energy and in action. Imperialism means, therefore, the revival of Byronism, an attempt to place action above speculation on the one side, and above materialism on the other side. Mr. George Meredith, who, more than any living man of letters, represents the transition between the older and the younger Victorian ideas, puts into the mouth of one of his best characters, Alvan of "The Tragic Comedians"-notoriously

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and even confessedly Ferdinand Lassalle, the orator and inspirer of German Social Democracy-a theory and special application of the Byronic gospel of action. When Clotilde first heard him (Alvan) speak, "His theme was action; the political advantages of action, and he illustrated his view with historical examples to the credit of the French, to the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who lead to compromise instead. Of the English he spoke as of a power extinct people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and shut the door upon bandit ideas. Action means life to the soul as to the body. Compromise is virtual death; it' is the path between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency. . . . Let, then, our joy be in war, in uncompromising action, which need not be the less a sagacious conduct of the war. Action energizes men's brains, generates grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, and is the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of our species."

But

These words are worth noting. Mr. Meredith is generally recognized as the first novelist of the day; if there can be truly said to be any rival near his throne, it is Mr. Thomas Hardy, like himself a novelist with a purpose, and one even more persistently tragic than his. Mr. Meredith has only now come into his kingdom, in the sense of even a circulating-library popularity. from his first appearance he has been an influence with the intellectually select, and there can be no doubt that, through their power in turn, much of his teaching-for in spite of his capacity as an interpreter of what he himself terms the Comic Muse, he is too serious not to be intentionally didactic-has been conveyed into the actions of the present generation, which of necessity knows him rather as a master, and a mystery, than anything