rial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or
General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt
Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial
egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to
the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea.

At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of
enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English
'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other
men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and
if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because
they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial
egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay
little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be
objected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling is
at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini
thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain
facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight
for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together
during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create
that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white
inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a
'dominant race,' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a
natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into
a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white
inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial
war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only
employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill
those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to
fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political
rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal
solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the
interests of our future opponents as well as those of our
fellow-subjects.

This sort of argument might of course be met by a _reductio ad
absurdum_. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will
be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the
victor in each inter-impe