Eton, Harrow, and the other public schools, together with the college
buildings of Oxford and Cambridge, converting them all into barracks,
while the students would find their own lodgings in the towns and stand
on far greater equality in regard to wealth. German is not a very
beautiful language, but it has a literature, and we should have the
advantage of speaking German and learning something of German literature
and history. Great improvements would be introduced in sanitation,
town-planning, and municipal government, and we should all learn to eat
black bread, which is much more wholesome than white.

In a large part of the country peasant proprietors would be established,
and the peasants as a whole would be far better protected against the
exactions and petty tyranny of the landlords than they are at present.
Under the pressure of external rule, all the troublesome divisions and
small animosities between English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh would tend to
disappear, though the Germans might show special favour to the Scots and
Presbyterians generally on the principle of "Divide and Rule," just as
we show special favour to the Mohammedans of India. We should, of
course, be compelled to contribute to the defence of the Empire, and
should pay the expenses of the large German garrisons quartered in our
midst and of the German cruisers that patrolled our shores. But as we
should have no fleet of our own to maintain, and in case of foreign
aggression could draw upon the vast resources of the German Empire, our
taxation for defence would probably be considerably reduced from its
present figure of something over seventy millions a year.

That, I think, is an impartial statement of the reasons which some
dominant Power, such as Germany, might fairly advance in defence of her
rule if we were included in a foreign Empire. At all events, they very
closely resemble the reasons we put forward to glorify the services of
our Empire to India and Egypt. I suppose also that the Fabians among
ourselves would support the foreign domination, just as their leaders
supported the overthrow of the Boer republics, on the ground that larger
states bring the Fabian--the very Fabian--revolution nearer. And,
perhaps, the Social Democrats would support it by an extension of their
theory that the social millennium can best arrive out of a condition of
general enslavement. The Cosmopolitans would support it as tending to
obliterate the old-fashioned di