Note.—A friendly critic who saw this chapter in MS. remarked: "I think the author has been very successful in ignoring some of the shady methods by which the British Empire has been extended." The criticism is not strictly relevant to the subject of the chapter, but as it may occur to other readers it may be well to deal with it in a brief note. I would answer:
(1) The "shady methods" of which he speaks were not the result of British Imperialism, or of a desire for conquest on the part of the British State. They were the result, melancholy but inevitable, of the contact of individuals and races at different levels of development. This contact between the stronger and the weaker (which can be illustrated from what is said about the sandalwood traders in the New Hebrides on p. 215 above) was the direct result of the explorations of the sixteenth century, which threw the seas of the world open to Western pioneers and traders. The extension of the authority of Western governments (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British), and the collisions between them, followed inevitably on the activities of their citizens, as has been pointed out on p. 216 above. All the Western governments have made mistakes in dealing with this unfamiliar situation; but the wise course for democratic public opinion, instead of railing at "Imperialism," would seem to be to familiarise itself with its problems and control its injurious tendencies.
(2) In any case, the mistakes of the past do not entitle us to wash our hands of responsibilities in the present. This war has shown that the non-self-governing parts of the Commonwealth are not, as our enemies supposed, a weakness to Great Britain in time of trouble, but a strength. In other words, whatever may have happened in the past, Great Britain has now won the consent of the ruled to the fact—not necessarily to the methods—of British rule. To use what is doubtless unduly constitutional language, we are now faced in India and elsewhere, not with a Revolutionary Movement, but with an Opposition. That is a great incentive to further development.
BOOKS
THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIOLENCE
BERNHARDI, Germany and the Next War (2s.), has become familiar. But this is only one application of a doctrine which has found expression in many spheres, as, for example, in the writings of the French Syndicalists, who claim to be copying the methods of Capitalism, and the principles of Bergson's philosophy—with what justification must be left to the reader to determine. See G. SOREL, Reflexions sur la Violence (Paris, Marcel Rivière, 1910, 5 francs), and Sorel's other writings. "Bernhardi-ism" is, in fact, not a German product: it has been before the public for some years under the name of "militancy," in connection with various causes, though it has never been put into execution on so tremendous a scale as by the Prussian Government. Nor is its philosophical basis to be found only, if at all, in Nietzsche.
KULTUR
The insistence on "Culture" as the main factor in the life and development of peoples is to be found in practically every German history, and in a great many non-German writers. It has received an additional vogue from the development of the study of Sociology, which naturally seeks out, in tracing the development of societies in the past, the elements which lend themselves to measurement and description, and these are inevitably, from the nature of the evidence, rather "cultural" than moral. It would be invidious to mention instances.
EDUCATION
For Dr. SADLER'S articles see p. 119, above. See also PAULSEN, German
Education: Past and Present. 1908. 5s. net.