But if spiritual Imperialism has made little progress in the land of Mazzini, Rome does not lack its party of material Imperialism, ever egging on Italy to deeds of derringdo and to the fulfilment of its “manifest destiny” in Tripoli and Cyrenaica, whose arid deserts flow with milk and honey under the imperialistic pen. More in sorrow than in anger a writer in the Tribuna rebukes these hotheads as merely literary: conquistadors by fury of metaphor and prosopopoeia, whereas real Imperialism—Francesco Coppola perceives with envy—is the irresistible instinct of an imperial race, whose expansion is unconscious or even anti-conscious, and which is rich in strong silent Kiplingesque heroes. Italy, a young nation, whose bones are not yet set, whose teeth are not yet sprouted, is falling, he laments, into the senile decay of socialistic rhetoric, and pacifical and humanitarian doctrine. The degenerate Italians have pulled up the railway lines to prevent the soldiers going off to the wars of expansion, have made a pother about “slavery,” and have diverted the world by setting Civil and Military Governors cock-fighting before Commissions of Inquiry. “And then we call ourselves the heirs of Rome!”

But, prithee, good Signor Coppola, is it not enough to be the heirs of Italy? Is it not enough to inhabit the most beautiful land in the world, the richest-dyed in historic tints, the greatest breeder of great men, the garden of the arts, the temple of religion? Is there no such thing as Intensive Imperialism? To produce the highest life per square mile is surely infinitely more Imperial than to multiply Saharas of mediocrity, to follow Stock Exchange adventures in Abyssinia or to decimate the dervishes of Benadir? In the village of my home there is only a single shop, and it writes over its windows the proud legend: “To lead in every department is our ambition.” But Italy, in open competition with the world, achieved the hegemony of civilisation in every department. What, beside this, is the military heirship of Rome?

And has England, the heir of Rome, so enviable a position? Far from it, alas! That unconscious or anti-conscious instinct of hers has landed her in the gravest situation of which consciousness was ever called upon to take stock. Holding nearly a quarter of the globe with a white population—outside these islands—of only ten millions; with a heterogeneous empire of Colonies, Crown Colonies, and Possessions, incapable of being brought under a single constitution or concept but that of force and tending to destroy such constitutions or ethical concepts as survive at home; with manifold subject races which she is too proud to make freemen of the Empire as Rome did; threatened and troubled in Europe by Germany, in Asia by India, in Africa by Egypt, in America by the States, in Australia by the Chinese and Japanese, the heir of Rome has seen her palmy days. The equilibrium is too unstable, and the part that came with the sword must perish with the sword. The Russo-Japanese war—the most important event in history since the fall of Rome—by destroying the glamour of the white man and showing that Christianity is not essential to success in slaughter—has shaken the foundations of her Indian and Egyptian Empire. The old apprehension that Russia was the menace to India is justifying itself, but it is Russia’s weakness, not her strength, that has provided the menace. Britain’s only future—no mean one indeed—lies in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and even here it is impossible for her to fill these great continents or sub-continents with the emigrating surplus of her decaying population, especially as her emigrants prefer the United States and are often excluded from her own Colonies. Her utmost hope is to keep these colonies British in constitution. They cannot be British in language—French Canada and Dutch South Africa forbid that; they cannot even be predominantly white, for North Australia is tropical and South Africa is not a white man’s country but a whited sepulchre—an aristocracy exploiting the coloured labour it despises, a society poised perilously on its apex. How unwieldy such an Empire at its best beside the United States—one continuous area, one language, one constitution, and but for the hereditary curse of the negro problem, one free and equal brotherhood! But how cumbrous even the United States, only kept from breaking into separate States with separate dialects by the modern network of railways, telegraphs and newspapers! How much more favourable to intensive and exalted living, a compact little country like Italy, rich in all the essentials of greatness and happiness!

There was the epic sweep of a statesman in Chamberlain’s vision of a true British Empire of federated freemen, but even with him Ireland was incongruously excluded, and the first fine prophetic rapture has chilled into commercialism under the British incapacity for imaginative synthesis. What was originally a consummation devoutly to be desired, and to be achieved only by sacrifice, is now presented as a policy that will pay, and even pay immediately. In the same breath we have an heroic trumpet-call and an estimate of the profits. It would, indeed, be strange if the good coincided so closely with the lucrative. But that is the trickery of all forms of Protectionist teaching, to dazzle with two alternative advantages simultaneously. Matilda is the heiress and Madge is beautiful—who would remain a bachelor when wealth and beauty are to be had for the asking?

Meantime the British Empire—so envied of the Italian Imperialist—is fast being conquered by Germany. For what is the mere absence of the German flag from our shores to our Germanisation in ideas, our transformation to German notions of conscription, our permeation by the doctrine of blood and iron? Already a pamphleteer calls for Lord Kitchener to “take away that bauble.” Whether the new German province which is replacing the old land of freedom continues to be called British or not, is a secondary matter. The formal consummation of the conquest would even relieve England of nightmares of unmanly terror and mountains of taxation. I like to think that it was this German province, and not the England of Edward VII which, ensuing Peace before Honour, made a compact with the Power of Darkness and put back the clock of Europe. It could not surely be the old Colossus of Freedom, whose untold millions fertilise every soil on earth and whose ships outnumber overwhelmingly the united vessels of the world—it could not surely be “the England of our dreams” which grasped the hand of Russia and sent Finland and Persia to their dooms, and now trembles to stir a finger for any cause, however forlorn, and any ideal, however British.

Let the nation of Mazzini take heed before it loses its own soul to gain the world.