any doubt the most tremendous and fascinating political question which
now awaits solution in the world, is the question whether the political
instinct of the British peoples, and the genius of self-government,
will find a way out of these difficulties, as they have found a way out
of so many others. Patience, mutual tolerance, willingness to
compromise, will be required in the highest measure if the solution is
to be found; but these are the qualities which self-government
cultivates.

'A thing that is wholly a sham,' said Treitschke, speaking of the
British Empire, 'cannot in this world of ours, endure for ever.' Why
did this Empire appear to Treitschke to be 'wholly a sham'? Was it not
because it did not answer to any definition of the word 'Empire' to be
found in German political philosophy; because it did not mean dominion
and uniformity, but liberty and variety; because it did not rest upon
Force, as, in his view, every firmly established state must do; because
it was not governed by a single master, whose edicts all its subjects
must obey? But for 'a thing that is wholly a sham' men do not lay down
their lives, in thousands and in hundreds of thousands, not under the
pressure of compulsion, but by a willing self-devotion; for the defence
of 'a thing that is wholly a sham' men will not stream in from all the
ends of the earth, abandoning their families and their careers, and
offering without murmur or hesitation themselves and all they have and
are. There must be a reality in the thing that calls forth such
sacrifices, a reality of the kind to which Realpolitik, with its
concentration upon purely material concerns, is wholly blind: it is the
reality of an ideal of honour, and justice, and freedom. And if the
Germans have been deceived in their calculations of Realpolitik, is it
not perhaps because they have learnt to regard honour, and justice, and
freedom as 'things that are wholly shams'?

This amazing political structure, which refuses to fall within any of
the categories of political science, which is an empire and yet not an
empire, a state and yet not a state, a super-nation incorporating in
itself an incredible variety of peoples and races, is not a structure
which has been designed by the ingenuity of man, or created by the
purposive action of a government; it is a natural growth, the product
of the spontaneous activity of innumerable individuals and groups
springing from among peoples whose history has