dia also a national spirit is coming to
birth, bred among a deeply divided people by the political unity, the
peace, and the equal laws, which have been the greatest gifts of
British rule; its danger is that it may be too quick to imagine that
the unity which makes nationhood can be created merely by means of
resolutions declaring that it exists, but the desire to create it is an
altogether healthy desire. On the surface it might appear that the rise
of a national spirit in the great members of the Empire is a danger to
the ideal of imperial unity; but that need not be so, and if it were
so, the danger must be faced, since the national spirit is too valuable
a force to be restricted. The sense of nationhood is the inevitable
outcome of the freedom and co-operation which the British system
everywhere encourages; to attempt to repress it lest it should endanger
imperial unity would be as short-sighted as the old attempt to restrict
the natural growth of self-government because it also seemed a danger
to imperial unity. The essence of the British system is the free
development of natural tendencies, and the encouragement of variety of
types; and the future towards which the Empire seems to be tending is
not that of a highly centralised and unified state, but that of a
brotherhood of free nations, united by community of ideas and
institutions, co-operating for many common ends, and above all for the
common defence in case of need, but each freely following the natural
trend of its own development.

That is the conception of empire, unlike any other ever entertained by
men upon this planet, which was already shaping itself among the
British communities when the terrible ordeal of the Great War came to
test it, and to prove as not even the staunchest believer could have
anticipated, that it was capable of standing the severest trial which
men or institutions have ever had to undergo.

IX

THE GREAT CHALLENGE, 1900-1914

At the opening of the twentieth century the long process whereby the
whole globe has been brought under the influence of European
civilisation was practically completed; and there had emerged a group
of gigantic empires, which in size far surpassed the ancient Empire of
Rome; each resting upon, and drawing its strength from, a unified
nation-state. In the hands of these empires the political destinies of
the world seemed to rest, and the lesser nation-states appeared to be
altogether overshadowed