confronts us, a
conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic
imperialism. And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert
hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war. The issue
is known.

The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her
empire, was a disaster to humanity. The spring of Athenian energy was
broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of
government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a
ruin. Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the
lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.

A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as
this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.

For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of
Athens or the Rome of the Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the
testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her
confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity. "The earth
is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's
secret, her empire is the highway of nations. That province, that
territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby
redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.

This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between
the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality--in the
Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality--and the vital
principle of the future.

Sec. 3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY

But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less
significant. It is the first great war waged by the completely
constituted democracy of 1884. In the third Reform Bill, as we have
seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their
realization. The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the
fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,
Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,
attain in this Act their consummation and their end. The wars waged by
the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their
constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig
or Tory oligarchies of last century. But in the present conflict a
democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated
by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.

Twice and twice