And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull Unigenitus, the procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la Révolution:—"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain, first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire moulded by a new ideal.
Let me illustrate this by a contrast—a contrast between two armies and what each brings to the vanquished.
Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago? That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage, fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army bring? Death comes with it—death in the shape most calculated to break the resolution of the most dauntless—the rack, the solitary dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the auto-da-fé, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the dungeon, nor the dread auto-da-fé; it brings with it, and not to one people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds, the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned generations of the past—an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "élargissez Dieu!"—to liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still; whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I. and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair, this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and for all time, which more than any other known to history represents humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
§ 3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished, the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply. The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant; the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race. The former nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an end. It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice, not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a natural presence. Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a condition of man's being. In the ancient world, government ever tends to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia, that State is imperial. In the modern, government with concrete justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function of the State whose ideal is higher.
The vision of the De Monarchia—one God, one law, one creed, one emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur—does but describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual and melancholic. Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"—"The State? I am the State." The ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar." That word thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God. It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual. Yet Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries after that command was uttered.
Such then is the character of the ideal. And in the resolution as a people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of Imperial Britain. None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen within the consciousness of a people. And to England through all her territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now. If ever there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of its fate, it is NOW! There is an Arab fable of the white steed of Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to every man, as to every people, comes once. Glory to that man, to that race, who dares to mount it! And that steed, is it not nearing England now? Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on the blast!
Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented themselves to men and to nations. Even now they present themselves, manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion of other States. But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every imperial race that History knows. How shall any empire, any state, conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the individual—"In honour preferring one another"? This in an imperial State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered. That pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony of Magersfontein. For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South Africa. If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to carry with it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic elevation in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of Timour. But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a design thus base, ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory the dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus? And in what cause have we died?" were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It is for the mines, it is for the mines!" No man can believe that; no man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night! The imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck. Great enterprises have ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities. But to arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this baser alloy? To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom long approved? Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.