essential to the maintenance of the struggle of nations, which is to quicken vigour and select the fittest or most efficient, that each competitor shall be stimulated to put forth his fullest effort by the same feelings regarding the superiority, the destiny, the rights and imperial duties of his country as the English imperialist entertains regarding England. And this is just what we seem to find.
The Englishman is genuinely confident in the superior fitness of England for any work she may essay in the civilisation of the world. This is the supreme principle of the imperialist statesmen, so well expressed in Lord Rosebery’s description of the British Empire as “the greatest secular agency for good the world has ever seen,” and in Mr. Chamberlain’s conviction [46] that “the Anglo-Saxon race is infallibly destined to be the predominant force in the history and civilisation of the world.” Of the superior competence of Englishmen for all purposes of government, quite irrespective of climatic, racial, or any other conditions, there is no touch, of doubt in the average man. “Why, I suppose you imagine we could undertake to govern France better than Frenchmen can govern her?” I heard put as an ironical poser in a discussion on British capacity. The triumphant retort, “Why, of course I do,” was no rhetorical paradox, but a perfectly genuine expression of the real conviction of most Englishmen.
Now, the French Chauvinist, the German colonialist, the Russian Pan-Slavist, the new American expansionist, entertain the same general conviction, with the same intensity, regarding the capacity, the destiny, the rights of their own nation. These feelings have, perhaps, come more clearly into the forefront of our national consciousness than in the case of any other nation, but events are rapidly educating the same imperial aspirations in all our chief industrial and political competitors.
“In our own day Victor Hugo declares France ‘the saviour of nations,’ and bursts out, ‘Non, France, l’univers a besoin que to vives! Je le redis, la