at the 'Anglo-Saxon stock
is infallibly destined to be the predominant force in the history and
civilisation of the world.' It was an arrogant, but not truculent, mood,
which reached its climax at the 1897 Jubilee, and rapidly declined
during and after the Boer war. These writers and statesmen were utterly
blind to the German peril, though the disciples of Treitschke were
already working out a theory about the future destinies of the world, in
which neither Great Britain nor Russia nor China counted for very much.
There were illusions on both sides of the North Sea, which had to be
paid for in blood. In both countries imperialism was a sentiment
curiously compounded of idealism and bombast, and supported by very
doubtful science. In the case of Germany the distortion of facts was
deliberate and monstrous. Not only was every schoolboy brought up on
cooked population statistics and falsified geography, but the thick-set,
brachycephalous Central European persuaded himself that he belonged to
the pure Nordic race, the great blond beasts of Nietzsche, which, as he
was taught, had already produced nearly all the great men in history,
and was now about to claim its proper place as master of the world.
Political anthropology is no genuine science. Race and nationality are
catchwords for which rulers find that their subjects are willing to
fight, as they fought for what they called religion four hundred years
ago. In reality, if we want to find a pure race, we must visit the
Esquimaux, or the Fuegians, or the Pygmies; we shall certainly not find
one in Europe. Our own imperialists had their illusions too, and we are
not rid of them yet, because we do not realise that the fate of races is
decided, not in the council-chamber or on the battle-field, but by the
same laws of nature which determine the distribution of the various
plants and animals of the world. It may be that by approaching our
subject from this side we shall arrive at a more scientific, if a more
chastened, anticipation of our national future than was acceptable to
the enthusiasts of expansion in the last twenty years of Queen
Victoria's reign.

The history of the world shows us that there have been three great human
reservoirs which from time to time have burst their banks and flooded
neighbouring countries. These are the Arabian peninsula, the steppes of
Central Asia, and the lands round the Baltic, the original home of the
Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. The in