er, Degas, for instance--proclaim
the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the
immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,
the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of
unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the
retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw
a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to
create a world."

The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift
influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply
defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be
hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal,
menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a
protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in
the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and
commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.

But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics
from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public
affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their
characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For
not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this
conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the
individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,
aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.

And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the
divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism
itself. Life is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history most
memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the
energy of the Renaissance. A higher mood than that of the England of
Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. Man's true peace is
not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a
work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to
the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion
of the world, but of God.

Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,
one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"
in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than
auspicious to this empir