and inflated self-esteem, is
affected. Though not quite identical with the economic interests of
the citizens, national honour has much to do with the conservation and
furtherance of those interests. It is a mirror cracked and smudged
with ancient dirt, which reflects imperfectly the economic motives of
the classes dominant in the nation.

The more primitive and instinctive a man, the more he is actuated by
these idealistic elements. The crowds on {148} the London streets on
Mafeking Day did not know what they wanted with the Rand mines, but
they were true-blue Britishers, a trifle drunk but all the more
patriotic. It is to this feeling of patriotism, sober or half-sober,
to which the men who have something to gain from imperialism appeal.
The home nation has its sacred duty to perform to the backward country,
which does not pay its debts and is rent by revolutions, fomented
perhaps abroad. The home nation must not relinquish its arduous
privilege. It must not haul down the flag. It must not defer to other
nations. Beyond the seas there is to be created a New England, a New
France, a New Germany, to which all the national virtues are to be
transplanted. The emigrants now lost to alien lands will carry their
flag with them, and the nation will no longer strew its seed upon the
sand. This nation (whichever one it happens to be) has a divine
mission, which it can never perform unless it has a suitable army and
navy, and unless this day week it sends a battleship to a certain port
in China or Africa.

This quasi-idealistic element in imperialism strongly reinforces the
economic argument. The German, Englishman or Frenchman dreams of
extending _his_ culture, _his_ language, _his_ influence, _his_
sovereignty. He takes pride in the thought that _his_ people rule in
distant lands, in deserts and jungles, in islands lying in tropical
seas, and on frozen tundras, where civilised man cannot live. It is
this dim mystic conception, this sense of an identification of a man's
small personality with a vast Imperium, that inspires the democracies,
which year by year vote supplies for imperialistic ventures,
far-sighted or absurd. Though this idealism is partly the expression
of an unrecognised economic need, yet for the most part, though perhaps
decreasingly, the average citizen looks at imperialism as a sort of
_aura_ to his beloved nation, and the conceptions {149} of national
prestige and of imperialistic dominion f