Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes
For ever-broadening England, and her throne
In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,
That knows not her own greatness: if she knows
And dreads it we are fall'n.
He had come to recognize the necessity for guarding and maintaining the Empire, with all its greatness and all its burdens, as part of this country's destiny.
It is a little difficult to realize that the British Empire, as we now know it, has been created within only the last hundred years. Beaconsfield, in his novel Contarini Fleming, describes the difference between ancient and modern colonies. "A modern colony," he says, "is a commercial enterprise, an ancient colony was a political sentiment." In other words, colonies were a matter of 'cash' to modern nations, such as the Spaniards: in the time of the ancients there was a close tie, a feeling of kinship, and the colonist was not looked upon with considerable contempt and dislike by the Mother Country.
Beaconsfield believed that there would come a time, and that not far distant, when men would change their ideas. "I believe that a great revolution is at hand in our system of colonization, and that Europe will soon recur to the principles of the ancient polity."
This feeling of pride in the growth and expansion of our great over-seas dominions is comparatively new, and there was a time when British ministers seriously proposed separation, from what they considered to be a useless burden.
The ignorance of all that concerned the colonies in the early years of Victoria's reign was extraordinary, and this accounted, to a great extent, for the indifference with which the English people regarded the prospect of drifting apart.
Lord Beaconsfield was a true prophet, for this indifference is now a thing of the past, and in the year 1875 an Imperial Federation League was formed, which, together with the celebrations at the Jubilees in 1887 and 1897, helped to knit this country and the Dominions together in bonds of friendship and sympathy. The rapid improvements in communication have brought the different parts of the Empire closer together; the Imperial Penny Postage and an all-British cable route to Australia have kept us in constant touch with our kinsmen in every part of the world where the Union Jack is flown.
But this did not all come about in a day. Prejudice and dislike are difficult to conquer, and it was chiefly owing to the efforts of Lord Beaconsfield that they were eventually overcome.
Imperialism too often means 'Jingoism,'—wild waving of flags and chanting of such melodies as:
We don't want to fight,
But, by Jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money too.