ay. Britain, also, as we have tried to show, has been
led by Fate to take a chief part in the extension of these principles
of Western civilisation to the non-European regions of the world; and,
after many mistakes and failures, has in the direction of her own wide
dominions found her way to a system which reconciles freedom with
unity, and learned to regard herself as being only the trustee of
civilisation in the government of the backward peoples whom she rules.
For the just and final determination of such gigantic issues not even
the terrible price we are paying is too high.

The issue of the great conflict lies still upon the lap of the gods.
Yet one thing is, we may hope, already assured. Although at the
beginning of the war they came near to winning it, the Germans are not
now likely to win that complete victory upon which they had calculated,
and which would have brought as its prize the mastery of the world. We
can now form some judgment of the extent of the calamity which this
would have meant for humanity. There would have remained in the world
no power capable of resisting this grim and ugly tyrant-state, with its
brute strength and bestial cruelty as of a gorilla in the primaeval
forest, reinforced by the cold and pitiless calculus of the man of
science in his laboratory; unless, perhaps, Russia had in time
recovered her strength, or unless America had not merely thrown over
her tradition of aloofness and made up her mind to intervene, but had
been allowed the time to organise her forces for resistance. Of the
great empires which the modern age has brought into being, the Russian
would have survived as a helpless and blinded mammoth; the French
Empire would have vanished, and the proud and noble land of France
would have sunk into vassalage and despair; the British Empire would
assuredly have dissolved into its component parts, for its strength is
still too much concentrated in the motherland for it to be able to hold
together once her power was broken. After a few generations, that will
no longer be the case; but to-day it is so, and the dream of a
partnership of free nations which had begun to dawn upon us would have
been shattered for ever by a complete German victory. Some of the atoms
of what once was an empire might have been left in freedom, but they
would have been powerless to resist the decrees of the Master-state.
There would have been one supreme world-power; and that a power whose
attitude towar