osition of the German language upon a forcibly united Europe. These
were the three most spirited and aggressive powers in the world. Far
more pacific was the British Empire, perilously scattered over the
globe, and distracted now by insurrectionary movements in Ireland
and among all its Subject Races. It had given these subject races
cigarettes, boots, bowler hats, cricket, race meetings, cheap revolvers,
petroleum, the factory system of industry, halfpenny newspapers in
both English and the vernacular, inexpensive university degrees,
motor-bicycles and electric trams; it had produced a considerable
literature expressing contempt for the Subject Races, and rendered
it freely accessible to them, and it had been content to believe that
nothing would result from these stimulants because somebody once wrote
"the immemorial east"; and also, in the inspired words of Kipling--

East is east and west is west,
And never the twain shall meet.

Instead of which, Egypt, India, and the subject countries generally had
produced new generations in a state of passionate indignation and the
utmost energy, activity and modernity. The governing class in Great
Britain was slowly adapting itself to a new conception, of the Subject
Races as waking peoples, and finding its efforts to keep the Empire
together under these, strains and changing ideas greatly impeded by
the entirely sporting spirit with which Bert Smallways at home (by the
million) cast his vote, and by the tendency of his more highly
coloured equivalents to be disrespectful to irascible officials. Their
impertinence was excessive; it was no mere stone-throwing and shouting.
They would quote Burns at them and Mill and Darwin and confute them in
arguments.

Even more pacific than the British Empire were France and its allies,
the Latin powers, heavily armed states indeed, but reluctant warriors,
and in many ways socially and politically leading western civilisation.
Russia was a pacific power perforce, divided within itself, torn between
revolutionaries and reactionaries who were equally incapable of social
reconstruction, and so sinking towards a tragic disorder of chronic
political vendetta. Wedged in among these portentous larger bulks,
swayed and threatened by them, the smaller states of the world
maintained a precarious independence, each keeping itself armed as
dangerously as its utmost ability could contrive.

So it came about that in every co