The Epic of England has yet to be written. It may be that the fulness of time for writing it has not come yet, or it may be that Britain is still waiting for her Homer and her Virgil. Perhaps the matured genius of a Rudyard Kipling, that strong, sweet Singer of the Seven Seas, may some day address itself to the accomplishment of this most splendid of all possible tasks, and then, again, it may be that it is his only to sound the prelude. That is a matter for the gods to decide in their own good time, but this much is certain—that when this work has been worthily done the world will hear echoing through the ages such a thunder-song as has never stirred human hearts before.

It will begin, doubtless, with the battle-cries of the old Sea-Kings of the North, chanted to the music of their churning oars and the rush and roar of the foam swirling away under the bows of their longships, and from them it will go on ringing and thundering through the centuries, ever swelling in depth and volume as more and more of the races of men hear it rolling over the battle-fields of conquered lands, until at last—as every loyal man of English speech must truly hope—the roar of the Last Battle has rolled away into eternal silence, and north and south, east and west, the proclaiming of the Pax Britannica heralds the epoch of

But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the coming of the singer whose master-hand shall blend the song and story of Britain into an epic worthy of his magnificent theme, materials may be gathered together, old facts may be presented in new lights, and the great characters who have played their parts in the most tremendous drama that has ever occupied the Stage of Time may be re-grouped in such fashion as will make their subtler relationships more plain, and all this will make the great work readier to the hand of the Master when he comes.

It is a portion of this minor work that I have set myself here to do. The making of a nation and the building of nations up into empires is, humanly speaking, the greatest and noblest work that human hands and brains can find to do, for the making of an empire means, in its ultimate analysis, the substitution of order for anarchy, of commerce for plunder, of civilisation for savagery—in a word, of peace for strife.

Now, the British Empire as it stands to-day is unquestionably the greatest moral and material Fact in human history, and hence it is permissible to assume that the makers of it must, each in his own way, whether of peace or war, have been the greatest empire-builders the world has yet seen, and it is my purpose here to take the greatest of these and tell with such force and vividness as I may, the story of the man and his work. I am not going to write a series of biographies arranged in prim chronological ranks, nor am I going to confine myself to the narration of collated facts so dear to the hearts of educational inspectors and scholastic examiners. Such you will find already cut and dried for you in the school-books and in many ponderous tomes, from the reading of which may your good taste and good sense deliver you!

I shall seek rather to show you the living man doing the living work which his destiny called him to do. The man will not always be found of the best, nor the work, seemingly, of the noblest, but what I shall seek to show you is that the work had to be done in order that a certain end might be accomplished, and that the man who did it was, all things considered, the best and, it may be, the only man to do it. In so far as I do not do this I shall have failed in the doing of my own work.

One more word seems necessary in order to anticipate certain possible misconceptions. Our empire-making is not yet complete, even at home. The centuries of strife during which the hammering and welding together of the nations which now make up the United Kingdom has been progressing have naturally and necessarily left certain national jealousies and antipathies behind them, and the last thing that I should desire would be to arouse any of these.

There are two kinds of patriotism, a smaller and a greater, a National and an Imperial. Both are equally good and noble, and it is necessary that the first should precede the second. But it is equally necessary that it should not supersede or obscure it, and it is to this later and greater, this Imperial patriotism that I shall appeal, and I would ask my readers, whatever their nationality, to remember that on the burning plains of India and the rolling prairies of Canada, in the vast expanses of the Australian Bush and the African Veld, there are neither Englishmen nor Scotsmen, Welshmen nor Irishmen; but only Citizens of the Empire, brothers in blood and speech, and fellow-workers in the building up of the noblest and stateliest fabric that human hands have ever reared or God’s sun has ever shone upon.