e wavering or the
resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,
alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous
surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not
this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries
hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired
to see or imagined they saw.

But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the
purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's
sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it
is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_. What is its
historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the
presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?

Sec. I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative
or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at
Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not
exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the
world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with
the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of
the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the
life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is
pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.
It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever
glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at
issue in the present war?

The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first
event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies
in this force named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous
expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action,
which now as always implies heroic suffering. No other war in our
history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so
exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. Whatever may have been
the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the
motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal
by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has
been prescribed and controlled. But the present war is not merely a
war for an idea, which o