Chapter IV

This awakening of a sense of duty to the State is leading to a more thorough understanding of the particular State to which we happen to belong—I mean of course the British Empire. This is another and a very promising change in the national mind. During the last few months a new vision has come to many of us of what the British Empire really is.

Speaking of Britons in general, I am afraid it must be confessed that our knowledge of the Empire, our grasp of its significance, have been inadequate to the immense human issues, and to the corresponding responsibilities, which the Empire involves. We have been proud of this vast heritage, we have complacently enjoyed the advantages which come to all of us from its possession, we have talked vaguely and largely about imperialism, but we have hardly taken our imperial duties to heart. Some of us may have done so, but not the nation as a whole. To the majority of the electorate the Empire has been a side issue, or a thing that might be left to look after itself. It seemed too big and too broadly based to be in danger of disturbance. Few of us gave much thought to it; few of us allowed our imaginations to play round its meaning; still fewer took the trouble to study its history. Had we done so we should have realized, as I am afraid not many did realize, that a day would dawn when our right to possess this Empire would be put to the proof, when we should be challenged before the world to show that our intelligence and our valour were equal to the vast imperial enterprise on which we had engaged.

But let us not forget that the British Empire, in its present extent and organization, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In size, in wealth, in the civilization of its component parts and their close relations with one another, its characteristics are so different from what they were a century ago that we can draw no parallel with the Napoleonic era. And now, for the first time in its history, this Greater Britain is being attacked—and attacked with unexampled vehemence and resolution. It is a new experience, and like all new experiences it is compelling a readjustment of thought.

This is a war of the Empire, by the Empire, for the Empire—and by the Empire I mean all for which the Empire stands, its ideals as well as its actualities. The Colonies and India are fighting for us and we are fighting for them. Our fellow subjects in India are represented by a great army of fine warriors, who have helped to check the would-be invaders of our shores. Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans have shed their blood that London might be safe. Mohammedan, Hindu, and Christian have fallen side by side in defence of the liberties of our race. This, I say, is a new thing in our history. We feel a deepened intimacy with these widely sundered races; the dominions over the seas seem no further off than the next county. The Germans predicted that the outbreak of war would split the Empire into fragments. It has given the Empire a splendid solidarity such as it never before possessed. It has made us a greater nation, not in the sense that it has added to our dominions, but in the deeper sense that it has caused our political consciousness to dilate to the imperial scale. The political organization of the Empire is acquiring a corporate mind, just as the mother country after the defeat of the Spanish Armada awoke to a new consciousness of her national individuality and began to know herself for what she was.

The parallel is profoundly interesting. It took the English people many centuries to discover their own country. The English in the reign of Henry VIII had a vaguer notion of England than we have of Canada (very few had seen a map of England); of Scotland than we have of Ceylon; of Ireland than we have of Central Africa. But just as these vague conceptions gave place in course of time to vision and realization and patriotic love for England, so now we British are beginning to think of the Empire as something more than a confused extension of our national boundaries, or as a group of appendages to our national home. The Empire is becoming _our country_, an inheritance of which we have to prove ourselves worthy, and we are becoming its citizens in heart as well as in name. Not that the change is already complete or even very far advanced. But no close observer of present tendencies will doubt that the movement of the national mind is in the direction of which I speak. Our imperial soul is beginning to germinate. If the change continues its ethical and spiritual consequences will be very great.