size and variety alone that English dominion is unique. Its crowning glory is its freedom,” [64] writes Mr. Henley, doubtless believing what he says. The suggestion of these words is that the “freedom” we enjoy in these isles is common to our fellow-subjects throughout the British Empire. This suggestion is false, as we have seen, but phrase-mongering Imperialism does not recognise its falsehood. The largest and most essential facts of Imperialism, political, economic, moral, are commonly unknown to the average “educated” Briton. To him our Empire is composed of a number of free, self-governing States, which are in close and growing industrial relations with us; individual and racial freedom and equal justice prevail everywhere; Christianity and British moral ideals are rapidly winning their way over the vast populations of the lower races, which gladly recognise the superiority of our ideas and characters and the benefits which they receive from British rule. These vague, hasty notions are corrected by no close study of facts and figures: the only substance which they commonly possess is the assertion of some friends or relatives who are “on the spot” in some British possessions and whose individual testimony is made to sustain a pile of imperialist notions. How many persons, during the South African war, based their convictions regarding the “outlander grievances” and the character and motives of the Boer Government upon the impassioned statement of some single dweller in Johannesburg, who had virtually no contact with Boers and knew nothing of grievances, excepting through the Rhodesian press, which fashioned them!
To what extent Imperialism lives upon “masked words” [65] it is difficult to realise unless we turn to the language of diplomacy, the verbal armoury of Imperialism. Paramount power, effective autonomy, emissary of civilisation, rectification of frontier, and a whole sliding scale of terms from “hinterland” and “sphere of interest” to "effective occupation” and “annexation” will serve as ready illustrations of a phraseology devised for purposes of concealment and encroachment. The Imperialist who sees modern history through these masks never grasps the “brute” facts, but