e vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within
its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed
mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,
deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the
funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead
yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,
laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence
sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.

Sec. 6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE
OF THE PRESENT

Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for
another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have
striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of
Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. Fixed in her resolve, the
will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course? The narrow
space of the path in front of her that is discernible even
dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?

Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a
principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of
Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of
conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The
scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but
the pragmatic expression of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical
basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in
human art, in human action. And thus that law, which, as I pointed
out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in
the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in
interpreting the last transformation of all.

The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the
domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial
Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of
the idea incarnate in Hellas.

The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as
the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished
systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. But the
Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished
races and through vanished universes.

Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations
undreamed till now, as Rome in the day