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